I remember this, too, and it's the second part I take issue with. A judgment call of "likely enough true" when the reality is "entirely fictional" points, in my opinion, to either a lack of judgment, or a lack of journalistic ethics. As others have pointed out, very basic fact-checking was all that was needed to figure out this guy was a complete fraud.

We should not be praising the New York Times for letting its standards slip because the story was so cool, then eventually - years later! - realizing they'd let them slip a little too much and half-heartedly apologizing.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/18/world/middleeast/caliphat...

There's no excuse for this; the organization failed to justify its claim to be the "paper of record".

I'm not saying that's how it should be, but apparently that's how it was.

As an aside, I think you can see this happening in California right now. California (and more specifically SF) has been winning for so long that now public officials have drunk their own cool-aid and seem to think Cali/SF is some sort of magic place and it's all the things they've done which have made it tech mecca. Except probably it's not, and that will become obvious as everyone slowly wakes up to that.

This has lead them astray many times in much more significant matters. Once reported, they treat contrary evidence as innuendo in all but the most severe cases of contrary evidence. I think they only bothered with a significant retraction effort here because the evidence of their error was so compelling and public.

I think it was a case of the NYT quite openly deluding themselves.

First of all, the whole article is about the editor-in-chief explaining why they cannot and will not consider themselves as the "Anti-Trump" paper, and how they'll teach their readers to live with the fact that Trump was elected (once).

As to "find a racial angle to as much as possible", I believe you're referring to the following:

As Audra Burch said when I talked to her this weekend, this one is a story about what it means to be an American in 2019. It is a story that requires deep investigation into people who peddle hatred, but it is also a story that requires imaginative use of all our muscles to write about race and class in a deeper way than we have in years. In the coming weeks, we’ll be assigning some new people to politics who can offer different ways of looking at the world. We’ll also ask reporters to write more deeply about the country, race, and other divisions. I really want your help in navigating this story.

To interpret "Us[ing] all our muscle" as "doing nothing else" or "pushing it into everything:" takes a strong mixture of motivated reasoning and bad faith.

First, he mentions class along with race, so the focus is already split in two.

Then, he specifies what is meant by "all our muscle": reassigning some talent with different perspectives to the politics beat, and asking others to "write more deeply" about not just race but country, race, and other divisions.

> And I do think that race and understanding of race should be a part of how we cover the American story. Sometimes news organizations sort of forget that in the moment. But of course it should be. I mean, one reason we all signed off on the 1619 Project and made it so ambitious and expansive was to teach our readers to think a little bit more like that. Race in the next year—and I think this is, to be frank, what I would hope you come away from this discussion with—race in the next year is going to be a huge part of the American story. And I mean, race in terms of not only African Americans and their relationship with Donald Trump, but Latinos and immigration. And I think that one of the things I would love to come out of this with is for people to feel very comfortable coming to me and saying, here’s how I would like you to consider telling that story.

Anyone who's read the NY Times regularly over the years has noticed this shift. Zach Goldberg has put numbers to the phenomenon,[1] but the trends are so large that you don't need a detailed statistical analysis to notice them, as a casual reader of the newspaper.

1. https://twitter.com/ZachG932/status/1133440945201061888?s=20

Edit: I previously included a paragraph here pointing to this issue being brought up even though it's one among many as evidence for race being a top issue. But reading some past comment of yours, you seem more reasonable than I expected, on that issue and in general.

Our disagreement may just be smaller than it appears, or concern "the media" more than the issue of race. If one were to stipulate that BLM was a major story, and maybe even that some of the President-unelect's words and deeds can be interpreted as not entirely lacking a resemblance with something that may, in a certain light, be considered to possibly fall under the umbrella of "being a racist", or even just that he was frequently misinterpreted in such a way by a bit more than half of the population... then race is, de facto, a major issue. Add to that some coverage that's been criticised as tone-deaf, and my starting point of considering the Times to not be the worst, and I think there's a good-faith interpretation of Banquet's intentions.

If, instead, you believe journalism in general, and the Times specifically, have been circling the drain for decades, it may sound different.

The 1619 Project, which the Times presented as its flagship project last year (and which Baquet discusses in the transcript), is a case in point. The really wild historical claims they made, and then the way they dismissed a pretty impressive group of historians (Gordon Wood, James McPherso, Sean Wilentz ... these are really major figures in the historical profession) who asked for corrections, while at the same time hiding the fact that their own fact checker had asked for the very same correction, and finally the way the lead author of the project attacked the historians on social media - the whole thing was really shocking. That's not how the NY Times is supposed to behave. To me, it signaled that they really didn't care about accuracy - this was their big statement, it was selling well, and they weren't going to let a few historians spoil it for them.

For an internal publication the economist has definitely slipped. FT under Japanese ownership meanwhile is still quite solid.

With so many grifters and snake oilers in the security space it must be really hard for the mainstream press to tell what is puffery.

Glad that some other HN-er has also noticed that. I've been an Economist reader for about 15 years now, and lately (the last 3-4 years, maybe?) I've started to notice that slippage you mention.

Among the most obvious cases for me was that "Corbyn as Lenin" front-page [1], which was absolutely disgraceful (if it matters I'm not an UK citizen and I don't particularly fancy Corbyn nor his policies), plus many of their Trump articles have been also pretty disgraceful, at least according to the Economist standards (the comic from one of the latest issues sends Trump directly to the garbage bin? like, what the hell is that?).

For comparison, I find the FT quite unchanged, and that's good.

[1] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CPHN3Z5WIAANXkw.png

I'm not the OP and just starting to dig into the 1619 project so take this with a grain of salt. There's a few parts that seem to extrapolate too far, or view everything from a pre-determined lens of race to chose their narrative.

One example is the claim that the U.S.'s lack of universal healthcare is the result of racism. The project goes on to detail how the Freedman's Bureau (which provided healthcare to former slaves) was prematurely closed, making the case it was because "legislators argued that free assistance of any kind would breed dependence and that when it came to black infirmity, hard labor was a better salve than white medicine."

I'm sure there were legislators that took that view, but other sources point out the organization was only intended to last for one year after the Civil War. When an extension was proposed, the main objections were that it was too expensive and would infringe on States rights. (Unironically, some of the same arguments used today).

Race is certainly part of the fabric of the nation's history and colors many of the problems faced, but I'm not sure race can be used as the root cause of every malaise as the project seems to allude.

>At one point, she sent me this assertion: “One critical reason that the colonists declared their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery in the colonies, which had produced tremendous wealth. At the time there were growing calls to abolish slavery throughout the British Empire, which would have badly damaged the economies of colonies in both North and South.”

>I vigorously disputed the claim. Although slavery was certainly an issue in the American Revolution, the protection of slavery was not one of the main reasons the 13 Colonies went to war.

[1] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/03/06/1619-proje...

The original version of the lead essay said: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/magazine/we-respond-to-th...

> one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery

The current version adds two key words that totally change the meaning: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/blac...

> one of the primary reasons some of the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.

These two statements are totally different. “One of the primary things the Democrats want is to defund the police” is obviously not true. “One of the primary things some of the Democrats want is to defund the police” is obviously true, but means something totally different.

The 1619 Project’s hit piece on capitalism was so bad that Jacobin had to step in with a correction piece: https://jacobinmag.com/2019/08/how-slavery-shaped-american-c...

> Desmond begins his article by drawing on the Harvard historian Sven Beckert who argues that “it was on the back of cotton, and thus on the backs of slaves, that the U.S. economy ascended in the world.” Yet Desmond neglects to mention that this claim has been widely rejected by specialists in the economic history of slavery.

The Jacobin piece even discusses better arguments the NYT could have made, such as slavery being a reason for the US’s particularly strong protection of private property. That’s debatable, but at least it’s within the realm of the mainstream thought among historians.

There is a real story here: people don’t appreciate the scope of things that were affected and influenced by the institution of slavery. But the New York Times went far beyond that in its bombastic claims: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/13/magazine/1619-project-liv...

> The goal of the project is to deepen understanding of American history (and the American present) by proposing a new point of origin for our national story. In the days and weeks to come, we will publish essays demonstrating that nearly everything that has made America exceptional grew out of slavery.

Deepening the understanding of American history is good. But claiming that “nearly everything that has made America exceptional grew out of slavery” is demagoguery. America didn’t rebuild Europe after WWII because of slavery. It didn’t become the most successful immigrant country in the world because of slavery. Silicon Valley, the moon landing, and our raft of Nobel Laureates didn’t grow out of slavery.

I'd encourage you to ask that question of modern Republican leadership.

> But claiming that “nearly everything that has made America exceptional grew out of slavery” is demagoguery.

No. Its a critical response a commonly held romanticization of the founding and early history of the US (an incredibly stupid romanticization given the amount of criticism the founders had for each other).

It's also a response to work by a variety of groups to erase the impact and negative stigma around Slavery. To re-romanticize it as heritage and something to be proud of.

I'm also not sure that you're correctly quoting the article (or perhaps it changed, but it currently reads)

> Out of slavery — and the anti-black racism it required — grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional: its economic might, its industrial power, its electoral system, its diet and popular music, the inequities of its public health and education, its astonishing penchant for violence, its income inequality, the example it sets for the world as a land of freedom and equality, its slang, its legal system and the endemic racial fears and hatreds that continue to plague it to this day. The seeds of all that were planted long before our official birth date, in 1776, when the men known as our founders formally declared independence from Britain.

I'd be curious to know which of those things you believe didn't grow, in some part or another, out of slavery. And whether the moon landing, silicon valley, or our many nobel laureates weren't in turn influenced/attracted/created by our economic might and industrial power.

> America didn’t rebuild Europe after WWII because of slavery. It didn’t become the most successful immigrant country in the world because of slavery. Silicon Valley, the moon landing, and our raft of Nobel Laureates didn’t grow out of slavery.

Directly? Perhaps not. But are you really going to claim that the immense wealth among white Americans didn't grow out of the subjugation of slaves (and native populations) and theft from those groups? Slavery jumpstarted the US economy, and much of the early US economy (even that of the North) was only successful due to slavery as an institution. That wealth still, today, hasn't really trickled back into the hands of Black Americans.

> America didn’t rebuild Europe after WWII because of slavery.

You're correct in that slavery was not the impetus for rebuilding Europe. But to ignore slavery (and, by the 1940s, the various post-slavery racist policies to subjugate and extract value from Black Americans, whether sharecropping or reconstruction era prison slavery in the south), yes there's a fair argument to be made that much fo the accumulated wealth of the US is due to that wealth not being distributed to slaves in the early years.

Consider the raw numbers: 1/6 of America's population in 1860 was slaves. That means that, as a reasonable guess, 20% of America's workforce wasn't compensated for their work on a national scale, and that was true for decades. Think about what a massive transfer of wealth that would be, compounded over the century and a half since.

> Silicon Valley

This is particularly ironic given Shockley's views on eugenics and race.

To put a concise point on it, I think this is something most people agree with. What the project seems to do, however, is change that understanding that slavery contributed to all those problems and instead claims it is the root cause of all of them.

Root cause and proximate causes can relate to the same problem but if we conflate the two we may get a very different understanding of how to fix it. I’m not convinced that every problem highlighted passes the “if not for” test. (E.g., if not for slavery, the US would have universal healthcare).

Side note: I appreciate all the thoughtful responses you’ve taken the time to give in this thread

That's a very bold claim to make, especially given that the half of the country that was heavily dependent on slavery lagged far behind, economically.

> That means that, as a reasonable guess, 20% of America's workforce wasn't compensated for their work on a national scale, and that was true for decades. Think about what a massive transfer of wealth that would be, compounded over the century and a half since.

It enriched a relatively small but very wealthy planter class, but there's a very strong argument to be made that it prevented economic development in the South. At the very least, something has to explain why the northern states economically developed so much more rapidly than the South during the first half of the 19th Century, and slavery is a very likely explanation.

When you're restricting yourself to first order effects, yes. But do you think that northern states didn't, like, benefit from the southern economy. Eli Whitney was a northerner through and through. Cotton, however, was able to be acquired cheaply due to slave labor.

> It enriched a relatively small but very wealthy planter class, but there's a very strong argument to be made that it prevented economic development in the South. At the very least, something has to explain why the northern states economically developed so much more rapidly than the South during the first half of the 19th Century, and slavery is a very likely explanation.

Yes, the northern recovery was easier because they didn't fall into a local maximum and have their economy entirely depend on slave labor to function. That doesn't mean that the northern/US economy didn't vastly benefit from cheap tobacco (and particularly tobacco exports), cotton (and exports), and sugar production. (The price of cotton went up significantly in the direct postwar period, but went back down eventually due to Sharcropping and increased production in the south, as well as increased competition from Egypt and other nations).

We now, I think, generally recognize the interconnectedness of economies. Pretending that prior to 1865 economies weren't also interconnected seems strange to me.

There are two separate issues here. First, you need to be careful to avoid double-counting. If cotton sales account for 5% of the economy, you can't go and add to that the money Eli Whitney makes from selling cotton gins to southern plantations. The cost of those cotton gins (rather, the amortized depreciation in the value of those cotton gins) is already baked into the sales price of the cotton. The economy is interconnected, but at the end of the day if the value of exported cotton produced by enslaved people is 5% of the economy, then the whole economy can't be singularly dependent on that industry.

Second, whether the workers on the plantations are paid labor or enslaved people doesn't change the economic calculus for Eli Whitney. He sells cotton gins either way. Back then cotton could be, and was, produced by free labor. When the Civil War disrupted the American cotton industry, free labor in India and Australia and Egypt filled the market gap: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-american-civil-wa....

I don't think I made such a claim. That said, this claim isn't correct. If the non-exported cotton was a key ingredient in the industries that make up the other 95% of exports (and the non-export economy), the economy would be dependent on that industry. Now I don't think that every aspect of the US economy was dependent on cotton, but textile exports, for example, wouldn't be included as cotton exports, and textiles used at home, wouldn't be either. So this metric does underestimate the economic impact of an industry.

> Second, whether the workers on the plantations are paid labor or enslaved people doesn't change the economic calculus for Eli Whitney. He sells cotton gins either way. Back then cotton could be, and was, produced by free labor. When the Civil War disrupted the American cotton industry, free labor in India and Australia and Egypt filled the market gap:

I agree. This doesn't change the core point: his fortune was built off of slave labor. There exist alternate timelines where it might not have been, but we don't live in those timelines. Trying to tease counterfactuals out of history isn't really good academics. The flow of history is complex enough that smart people can come to contradictory conclusion. Thus, what happened: the US cotton economy was built on the backs of slave labor. Anything else (even conjecture that I agree with, that the US economy would have been stronger sooner with less slavery as it was essentially a local maxima and prevented other forms of innovation) is conjecture.

Almost all US cotton production was exported, mostly to England. Also remember that at this time, the vast majority of the economy is self-sufficient farmers. My wife’s family wasn’t buying southern cotton out in Oregon. They were living off the land.

Circling back to the Jacobin article, most historians reject the idea that cotton production with slave labor was a big part of the American economy. The contrary claims come from a handful of scholars like Ed Baptist, and as shown in the link above he’s methodology is flawed and rests on double counting.

> Trying to tease counterfactuals out of history isn't really good academics.

You asserted above that immigration into the US and Silicon Valley, for example, can be said to have grown out of slavery because slavery is the source of America’s economic and industrial might. On one hand, the factual premise is false. Slavery was a small part of the economy before it was abolished. And the wealth that drew people to the country was mostly created after slavery was abolished.

Apart from that, you’re invoking a peculiar sort of causation. Someone comes to America as an immigrant and starts a company in 1970, and according to you that “grew out of slavery?” That’s a very “original sin” view of slavery, where the country is forever tainted by the fact slavery existed at one time, regardless of whether there are any traceable benefits to people living today resulting from slavery.

There is a metaphysical sense in which that is true but I don’t think most people would interpret “grew out of” that way. More important, thats not how the 1619 Project authors appear to view the causation either. That’s why they rely on this flawed article claiming that 50% of the US economy was from slavery. Their narrative depends on making slavery seem more economically significant than it was, and making people believe they derive tangible benefits from it today.

By 1850, 40% of the population was employed in non-agriculture, GDP of non-agriculture was higher. Its unclear if this number included slaves as part of the population or not, but either way that suggests that either a minority (though a plurality), or a slim majority at most, was employed in subsistence agriculture style work.

But I want to reiterate that I'm not disagreeing with your conclusion, just with the line of reasoning that 5% of exports implies only a small amount of the economy.

> And the wealth that drew people to the country was mostly created after slavery was abolished.

I'm not sure I see the point here beyond "slavery was a long time ago", and given the historically exponential nature of wealth and economic growth most of it will have been acquired recently. That doesn't mean that perturbations to the initial conditions don't matter, just the opposite: their impacts will be magnified many times over.

I'll reiterate: could America have flourished without slavery? Probably (there's some questions about early America and investment in the new world without slavery, which I think the 1619 project raises, but if you start from 1776, yeah at that point United States could probably have done fine without slavery, and it's a tragedy that the founders didn't make that choice). But the founders didn't make that choice, so we're left with a United States that did have an economy dependent on slavery. And it was dependent enough on slavery that half the states were willing to fight a war over slavery (I mean also the racism and white supremacy, but economic anxiety was at least one component even then).

> That’s a very “original sin” view of slavery, where the country is forever tainted by the fact slavery existed at one time, regardless of whether there are any traceable benefits to people living today resulting from slavery.

But, like, there are. I mean you've admitted as much with things like the wealth gap. A significant portion of the white/black wealth gap in the US can be traced back to slavery (and a lot of the rest of it to racist policies since then, some of which still exist today). That's a tangible benefit.

I'm willing to concede that the 1619 project is perhaps to focused on slavery specifically, and might better be phrased as "the US was founded on white supremacist principles that continue to exist and benefit many of its citizens at the expense of others, even today, with slavery as but one of the most visible," but I get the feeling you'd object to that also.

And those kinds of policies do influence the kinds of people we let immigrate, and who gets VC funding, and who gets hired, and and and.

As for "original sin", I think drawing attention to broken systems is important, especially those systems we hold in extremely high regard. The aura around the US as the city on a hill or whatever that people like to push tries to absolve people of responsibility to fix broken systems, either by pretending that there are no problems now, or that there never were any problems to begin with.

Yeah sure, an immigrant who came here in the 70s didn't contribute to the creation of slavery and the systems that grew out of it, but as long as those systems persist, they'll be the beneficiaries (or victims, depending) of those systems. And yeah, some of those systems run deep in the American ethos.

I would certainly object to it, as would most historians, I think.

The principles the US was founded on - that is, the principles that drove the colonies to declare independence from Britain and the unique ideas about government that they incorporated into the state constitutions (and eventually the federal Constitution) were not "white supremacist." Most of the world practiced slavery at the time. The empire they were breaking away from was the #1 slave-trading nation in the world at that time. Slavery was a pre-existing fact when the United States was founded. It wasn't the motivation for the founding.

In fact, at the time, the principles of the revolution were widely regarded as being in conflict with slavery, which is why the United States became one of the first centers of anti-slavery activism in the world. And it's why the northern states became some of the first places in the world to abolish slavery. Even slaveowners in Virginia began questioning slavery at this time. Jefferson, despite his own ownership of slaves, wrote the clause that forbade slavery in the Northwest Territories, and even proposed a new constitution for Virginia that would have freed anyone born after 31 December 1800. This was extremely early, in an international perspective, in the global anti-slavery movement. Britain wouldn't ban slavery until the 1830s.

When later Southern leaders tried to defend slavery, they found the founding principles to be an embarrassing stumbling block. The famous Cornerstone Speech, given by the vice president of the Confederacy, was very self-consciously formulated as a repudiation of the Declaration of Independence, replacing "all men are created equal" with a new supposed "great truth" that people are created unequal. From the "Cornerstone Speech":

> The prevailing ideas entertained by him [Jefferson] and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old Constitution were, that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with; but the general opinion of the men of that day was, that, somehow or other, in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. [...] Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong.

The fact that the American Revolution did not eliminate slavery does not mean that the principles of the revolution were white supremacist, any more than Athenian democracy's founding principle was mysogeny, because Athens didn't overturn male-dominated society. The American revolution took a society that already had slavery, servitude, etc., and introduced new democratic principles, abolished many forms of servitude, generated opposition to slavery and outlawed slavery in half the new country. Slavery was not something the revolution introduced or ideologically strengthened. Quite the opposite.

The cornerstone speech illustrates how the principles embodies in the constitution weren’t just some platitude but were in fact disputed. Other parts of the cornerstone speech are especially illuminating:

> Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science.... Those at the North, who still cling to these errors, with a zeal above knowledge, we justly denominate fanatics. All fanaticism springs from an aberration of the mind from a defect in reasoning. It is a species of insanity. One of the most striking characteristics of insanity, in many instances, is forming correct conclusions from fancied or erroneous premises; so with the anti-slavery fanatics.

The Confederacy attacked the founders as zealots and fanatics who didn’t accept the “scientific fact” of inequality of the races. Such thinking would persist well into the 20th century with eugenicists promoting scientific racism. Even today, the idea that everyone is created equal—even as an idea, forget about the implantation—is not universally accepted, especially outside the west.

And "The US was founded on white supremacist principles" can both simultaneously be true.

> Even slaveowners in Virginia began questioning slavery at this time. Jefferson, despite his own ownership of slaves, wrote the clause that forbade slavery in the Northwest Territories, and even proposed a new constitution for Virginia that would have freed anyone born after 31 December 1800. This was extremely early, in an international perspective, in the global anti-slavery movement. Britain wouldn't ban slavery until the 1830s.

Sort of, some antislavery sentiment in the UK predates the revolution. In 1772, slavery was ruled to be prohibited in England under English common law. It was still allowed in British colonies, but calling any founder a "leader" in this regard doesn't hold up to scrutiny. No law needed to be passed banning slavery in England, because it was already illegal prior to the founding of the US. The 1930 law you cite banned slavery in British colonies, but it had already been illegal in England for 60 years, and the slave trade was made illegal in 1807. In other words, in every aspect (partial abolition, total abolition, etc.) the UK led the US.

Article 1, Section 9 of the US constitution likely delayed that British law (the US and UK banned the slave trade simultaneously). Are you really going to tell me that Article 1, Section 9 isn't white supremacist? It literally prohibits the government from banning the slave trade until 1808.

Many were far ahead of the general sentiment of the time on slavery.

> In 1772, slavery was ruled to be prohibited in England under English common law.

The ruling was narrower than that. Strictly speaking, it said that slaves could not be taken from England to the colonies against their will. There were similar "freedom suits" occurring in the colonies at the time. However, the anti-slavery movement on both sides of the Atlantic was small at this time. Slave-owning interests in Britain had far more power in government than the small anti-slavery movement. Their plantations were in the West Indies, which the 1772 ruling had no impact on. In its most expansive possible interpretation (which was not the interpretation that Lord Mansfield, the judge, took), the 1772 ruling affected a relatively small number of slaves in England who worked as domestic servants. It didn't affect the massive plantations in the colonies, many owned by the English aristocracy, where the real economic interest lay.

> In other words, in every aspect (partial abolition, total abolition, etc.) the UK led the US.

This isn't a competition, but to paint Britain as an anti-slavery power at the time of the revolution would be absurd. In the run-up to the revolution, Britain vetoed even limited attempts by American colonies to constrain the slave trade. Virginia, for example, attempted to tax the slave trade out of existence in the early 1770s, only to find its law vetoed by the Crown. In general, the British and American anti-slavery movements were in close contact and fed off one another. The American Revolution, and the wave of anti-slavery acts across the northern states, are generally seen as having strengthened the British anti-slavery movement.

> Article 1, Section 9 of the US constitution likely delayed that British law (the US and UK banned the slave trade simultaneously). Are you really going to tell me that Article 1, Section 9 isn't white supremacist? It literally prohibits the government from banning the slave trade until 1808.

It was a result of a compromise between pro- and anti-slavery forces. It was widely understood that that provision put an expiration date on the slave trade. In other words, it can equally be viewed as an anti-slavery measure, delayed by 20 years in order to appease South Carolina. Long before the federal ban on the slave trade went into effect in 1808, however, every state except for South Carolina banned the trade.

Directly, the Northern economy didn't depend at all on slave labor. It depended on wage labor, supplied in large part by large numbers of immigrants. Almost all immigrants settled in northern states, because there was very little opportunity for them in southern slave-owning society. The jobs and economic growth were almost all in the industrializing North.

The South exported most of its cotton (Britain was the largest importer, I think), so if we're talking about who relied indirectly on slavery, there's a much better argument for Britain being the primary beneficiary than the northern states.

Economies are interconnected, but that's not the core of your claim - the one I object to. The claim that I object to is that slavery is responsible for the US' economic development. From what I've read, it appears much more to have severely stunted economic growth in half the country for decades, while the half that relied on free labor rapidly industrialized.

It appears to me much more that the Southern plantation economy depended heavily on industrial growth in Britain and the northern US, but that British and American textile mills were capable of sourcing their cotton elsewhere if need be (including from economies that used wage labor). The South was much more similar to modern countries that depend entirely on one or a few low-tech exports, such as oil or lumber. Such economies are at the mercy of the international price of their one product. They face tough international competition, because their product isn't particularly complicated, and it's relatively easy to increase production elsewhere in the world. An economy that only exports oil may make a few magnates wealthy, while leaving the economy as a whole stunted and most of the population poor.

Its entirely consistent with what "modern Republican leadership" believes. From Trump's executive order inaugurating the 1776 project: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-or...

> The American founding envisioned a political order in harmony with the design of “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” seeing the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as embodied in and sanctioned by natural law and its traditions. The formation of a republic around these principles marked a clear departure from previous forms of government, securing rights through a form of government that derives its legitimate power from the consent of the governed. Throughout its national life, our Republic’s exploration of the full meaning of these principles has led it through the ratification of a Constitution, civil war, the abolition of slavery, Reconstruction, and a series of domestic crises and world conflicts. Those events establish a clear historical record of an exceptional Nation dedicated to the ideas and ideals of its founding.

The founding principles weren't fulfilled in 1776, but the history of the country has been one of progress in that direction. That was conventional wisdom among Democratic political leadership when I was growing up (and I'm only 37) and almost certainly still is the conventional wisdom among most rank-and-file Democrats.

> It's also a response to work by a variety of groups to erase the impact and negative stigma around Slavery. To re-romanticize it as heritage and something to be proud of.

The claim isn't directed to one group's heritage and its contribution. On its face, it is directed at "nearly everything that has truly made American exceptional." It literally ties the entirety of the American story (or nearly all of it) to slavery.

> I'm also not sure that you're correctly quoting the article (or perhaps it changed, but it currently reads)

I copied directly from the post I linked. Its an August 13, 2019 article promoting a kick-off event for the 1619 project.

> I'd be curious to know which of those things you believe didn't grow, in some part or another, out of slavery. And whether the moon landing, silicon valley, or our many nobel laureates weren't in turn influenced/attracted/created by our economic might and industrial power.

Almost none of those things grew out of slavery. Our "legal system" for example was imported wholesale from England--based on principles of the Magna Carta dating back to 1215. Any slave trade into England itself was banned in 1102. Are there imprints on our legal system from slavery? Sure. But its factually incorrect to say our legal system "grew out of slavery."

The notion that our "economic might and industrial power" grew out of slavery is the central economic misconception in the 1619 Project, and I think it's responsible for a lot of the bombastic rhetoric. America is not rich today because of slavery. Jacobin corrected that assertion: https://jacobinmag.com/2019/08/how-slavery-shaped-american-c... ("Desmond begins his article by drawing on the Harvard historian Sven Beckert who argues that 'it was on the back of cotton, and thus on the backs of slaves, that the U.S. economy ascended in the world.' Yet Desmond neglects to mention that this claim has been widely rejected by specialists in the economic history of slavery."). As Jacobin points out, cotton production, the industry where most enslaved people were employed, accounted for 5-10% of the economy.

This is not some right-wing view. Jacobin Magazine is actual socialists/communists. Slavery can make plantation owners rich at the expense of enslaved people. But it can't make an entire country richer than it would have been without the labor of enslaved people. That's contrary to basic economic theory, as well as the economic data we have from the time: https://www.econlib.org/archives/2014/09/ending_slavery.html... http://bradleyahansen.blogspot.com/2018/06/was-slavery-centr....

> But are you really going to claim that the immense wealth among white Americans didn't grow out of the subjugation of slaves

Absolutely. You can't make a country richer by enslaving part of the population, and you don't need slavery to make a country rich. This is obviously true: in the 20th century countries like Japan, Singapore, and South Korea experienced industrialization and economic development just as rapid as what the United States experienced in the 19th century, without slavery. The United States economy, in fact, continued to grew just as fast after the civil war as before it: https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-7LfU4Qu52oo/UUolq1OZROI/AAAAAAAAD.... If slavery had been critical to the U.S. economy, you would've expected a massive economic collapse right after the civil war. But there wasn't even a blip.

Do you believe that the newly emancipated slaves retreated to their own self-subsistence farms directly after the civil war or what?

This isn't my field, but I have read a few papers about the question of how profitable slavery was. Most of the debate seems to be over how profitable it was to the plantation owners, and whether they personally would have made larger profits by investing their money elsewhere (e.g., by hiring wage laborers to work their plantations, or by investing in manufacturing).

The question of slavery's impact on the development of the economy as a whole is completely different from that. Given how backwards the South remained, while the half of the country that abolished slavery surged ahead economically, it's difficult to see how one could argue that slavery caused the US' economic development.

Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about this in Democracy in America. It's well worth reading, to see a contemporary Frenchman's impressions of the stark difference in economic development between the Southern slave and Northern free societies: https://www.tota.world/article/1860/

Correct, but I didn't claim either of these things. I asked if the immense wealth among white Americans didn't grow out of the subjugation of slaves. Imagine 100 people who are equally wealthy. Now, imagine you take 1/6 of the people, remove all of their wealth, and disperse it among the remaining 5/6. Perhaps you skim a few percent off the top due to inefficiencies of the scheme. Are you saying the 5/6 people here didn't benefit? Sure seems like they did!

> The claim isn't directed to one group's heritage and its contribution. On its face, it is directed at "nearly everything that has truly made American exceptional." It literally ties the entirety of the American story (or nearly all of it) to slavery.

You...you read the full quote, right?

> Almost none of those things grew out of slavery. Our "legal system" for example was imported wholesale from England--based on principles of the Magna Carta dating back to 1215. Any slave trade into England itself was banned in 1102. Are there imprints on our legal system from slavery? Sure. But its factually incorrect to say our legal system "grew out of slavery."

There are a number of uniquenesses to the American legal system that trace themselves to slavery and racism. And I'd argue that many of those things are the things that make the American legal system "exceptional" and unique.

> The founding principles weren't fulfilled in 1776, but the history of the country has been one of progress in that direction. That was conventional wisdom among Democratic political leadership when I was growing up (and I'm only 37) and almost certainly still is the conventional wisdom among most rank-and-file Democrats.

See, I read the opposite from this. "Consent of the governed" is incompatible with slavery. You say that this was simply the principles "not being fulfilled" at the time, but then how can you say that we were founded on a set of values that the constitution then proceeds to explicitly reject? The constitution provides for the 3/5ths compromise, but didn't encode a right to vote (for anyone, that was left up to the individual states) until reconstruction.

> but the history of the country has been one of progress in that direction

This is sort of a meaningless platitude. "Sure you still don't have the rights to life, liberty, and happiness yet, like most people do, but you're closer now than your ancestors were 150 years ago" isn't exactly a ringing endorsement of the US.

Slave ownership was strongly concentrated. A relatively small class of plantation owners got rich off slavery. They didn't redistribute the proceeds across the entire white population. Economically, the slave-owning South, as a whole, lagged far behind the North, and slavery is a likely cause for that economic backwardness.

> didn't encode a right to vote (for anyone, that was left up to the individual states) until reconstruction.

That has nothing to do with slavery. The Constitution was written at a time when democracy was viewed with suspicion, and moreover. Nevertheless, the United States was, at the time, rapidly becoming one of the most democratic polities in the world. One way to see this is to look at the state constitutions written in this era.

My comment here wasn't about slavery. It was about the claim that america was founded on the principle of government by the consent of the governed.

I think your response proves my point.

> One way to see this is to look at the state constitutions written in this era.

Well, minus the whole slavery thing enshrined in half of them (not to mention landownership requirements that lasted until the civil war in some places, and the net reduction in voting rights in the early 1800s).

Like even at its founding, the US was only marginally better than the UK in terms of enfranchisement. About 2% of Philidelphians were eligible voters. That's the capital of a free state with only a few slaves.

> . A relatively small class of plantation owners got rich off slavery. They didn't redistribute the proceeds across the entire white population. Economically, the slave-owning South, as a whole, lagged far behind the North, and slavery is a likely cause for that economic backwardness.

The south, for the 17th time were not the only people who benefitted. Northern businesses that depended on various plantation based exports also gained.

But even still, I agree that your average white farmer didn't gain a lot, that's true of capitalist economies, not slavery in particular. The gilded age didn't fix wealth inequality.

The bigger question is whether or not the relatively rich and influential southern plantation owners had an outsized impact on, say, the development of universities and such.

This was absolutely a central principle of the revolution. The objections to taxation by Parliament rested on the colonists' lack of representation in that body.

> Like even at its founding, the US was only marginally better than the UK in terms of enfranchisement. About 2% of Philidelphians were eligible voters.

Perhaps at the founding of the US that was true, but Pennsylvania passed a radically democratic state constitution in 1776 that was highly innovative and unusual in many ways (e.g., a council elected by the people every 7 years to review all laws passed since the last council, with the power to veto any law they considered unconstitutional). The new state constitution granted the right to vote to any man who paid taxes, which by 1787 was nearly 90% of the adult white male population.

> Northern businesses that depended on various plantation based exports also gained.

How did they gain from slavery? They could but cotton from anywhere, and if the South wasn't delivering, they could import it from other countries. The argument works much better in reverse: Southern plantation owners depended critically on the rapidly expanding British and American textile industries. The planters were delivering a relatively low-tech, raw product. The textile mills didn't particularly care how it was produced, and they had multiple sources they could buy it from.

> The gilded age didn't fix wealth inequality.

But it did deliver much more economic development than the old slaveocracy.

Right, but the replacement didn't functionally address the broad issue of consent of the governed. It replaced a government of wealthy white gentry with a wealthy white gentry in a different location. Your average American citizen didn't actually gain much, if anything, in terms of representation. Only the upper class did (which is, in many ways, the class we're arguing about).

> Perhaps at the founding of the US that was true, but Pennsylvania passed a radically democratic state constitution in 1776 that was highly innovative and unusual in many ways

And it was practically unique in that regard. The NJ constitution had a wealth requirement and, despite originally granting women and free black people the right to vote, it later rescinded those rights!

Not to mention a Constitution like South Carolinas, which required slave ownership to hold public office.

But more importantly, while the US was busy regressing from the founding principles it only halfheartedly upheld, other nations were busy drafting and creating new constitutions that better uphold those ideals. And tot he point I keep returning to: our deification of the original constitution prevents many necessary improvements in that regard.

> But it did deliver much more economic development than the old slaveocracy.

I don't think I've said otherwise. You seem to think the argument I'm making somehow relies on slavery being a lynchpin of the American economy. It doesn't. It only requires that it have been present.

You're completely wrong about this. You just have to look at the constitutional changes in the states and the huge growth in participation in politics in the 1780s. The revolution was a mass movement, and it had a profound effect on how the general population viewed politics and on what sort of government they were willing to accept.

> And it was practically unique in that regard. The NJ constitution had a wealth requirement and, despite originally granting women and free black people the right to vote, it later rescinded those rights!

Pennsylvania wrote the most democratic state constitution, but it was not at all unique in overhauling its system of government to become much more participatory. New Jersey's 1776 state constitution lowered property requirements, replaced the royal governor with a governor selected by the elected legislature, and reduced his powers (e.g., no veto power), and as you point out, removed racial and gender restrictions to voting.

> But more importantly, while the US was busy regressing from the founding principles it only halfheartedly upheld, other nations were busy drafting and creating new constitutions that better uphold those ideals.

The US was one of the only democratic republics in the world well into the 19th century. That's the context for Lincoln's statement that the United States was "the last best hope of earth." The 1848 revolutions in Continental Europe had been crushed, and the US appeared to many to be the only major democratic country left standing.

> It only requires that it have been present.

If that's the extent of your argument, then your argument is fairly meaningless. Everyone knows that slavery existed in the South. What I and others object to is the claim that the US became wealthy because of slavery. It seems much more likely to me that the US was economically held back by slavery.

> one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery

Gordon Wood responded,

> "I don't know of any colonist who said that they wanted independence in order to preserve their slaves."

Gordon Wood is known as the expert on colonial pamphlets and ideology more generally during the Revolutionary era, so him saying this carries a lot of weight. Gordon Wood and a bunch of other very well known historians wrote to the NY Times to ask for corrections. The editor of the magazine, Jake Silverstein, published their letter next to his rebuttal, in which he argued that defending slavery was indeed a cause of the revolution.[1] What he didn't say was that the NY Time's own fact checker had objected to the claim. That only came out later.[2] The embarrassment of that revelation finally caused the NY Times to slightly weaken - but not entirely drop - its claim about the revolution.

The claim about the revolution caused the most controversy, because it has huge consequences for how one interprets American history, but it was hardly the only false or highly questionable claim. A few others:

* The US has worse labor protections than Brazil because of the US' history of slavery (Brazil was the largest slave nation in modern history, and abolished slavery well after the US did).

* Presenting New Orleans as the financial capital of the antebellum US (NY city alone had nearly as much banking capital as the entire South, and far more than New Orleans).

* Claiming that double-entry bookkeeping was invented on Southern plantations (that would be a surprise to Luca Pacioli, the 15th-Century Florentine mathematician who wrote a treatise on double-entry bookkeeping).

Just fundamentally, I would tell anyone who doesn't already know the history well not to try to learn it from the 1619 Project, because you really can't trust any of the factual claims in the project. People would be much better served by reading more standard historical works (including some of the very accessible works written by critics of the 1619 Project that deal with slavery - James Oakes and James McPherson come to mind).

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/magazine/we-respond-to-th...

2. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/03/06/1619-proje...

The "ISIS as unconscionable bogeyman" story also helped sell the U.S. intervention in Syria, which was an ongoing objective on the NYT's part.

Completely justified and reasonable judgement that something is "likely to be true" can be sometimes be incorrect because that's what the word "likely" means.

This is a good warning that we ought to be more mindful of.

[1] https://twitter.com/rcallimachi/status/1339956839082037250

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/18/business/media/new-york-t...

Saying nothing when you have no data is fine, asserting / prescribing something ("you don't need to wear masks") when you have no data is not. Err on the side of caution, hedge against risk. This is basic stuff and top public health officials need to be held to a (much) better standard.

Both Fauci and the Times made an elementary mistake/miscalculations that reflects terribly on trust people place with them.

The media then lambasts anyone who uses this to sow scepticism about these institutions, calling them conspiracy theorists instead.(which is true for certain cohorts, but wielded as a blanket statement)

My trust in various academic institutions has gone down by orders of magnitude since the UCL/NE Journal and many of the other covid fiascos. The statistical and scientific rigor employed by experts and epidemiologist seems to be massively lacking.

Similarly, a series of missteps by the NYT has led me to (a much larger degree than the previous analogy) lose trust in its reporting. Sadly, there do not seem to be any alternative sources outside of either reading the papers directly or finding specific individuals I place high amount of trust in.

Both are all too time consuming for someone with a full time job.

People tend to use mask wearing as a replacement for social distancing. They aren't. They are a risk mitigation method for cases where social distance is unavoidable. CDC opposed mask wearing specifically because people would interpret it as a less-effective security blanket. They only reversed their stance when it became apparent that the US public weren't willing to use social distancing effectively.

The quote below is from "Professional and Home-Made Face Masks Reduce Exposure to Respiratory Infections among the General Population". There's enough studies looking at this for SARS and influenza- including for the general population - that it is highly irresponsible to err on the side of not using masks even if there's no clear evidence for population usage for SARS-2.

"Opportunistic data collected during the SARS epidemic in Asia suggested that population-wide use of face masks may significantly decrease transmission of not only SARS but also influenza [3,4,5,6,7]. As part of pandemic preparedness, many are contemplating the contribution wide-spread use of masks could have [8,9]."

3. Lau JTF, Tsui H, Lau M, Yang X (2004) SARS transmission, risk factors and prevention in Hong Kong. Emerging Infectious Diseases 10: 587–92.

4. Lo JYC, Tsang THF, Leung Y, Yeung EYH, Wu T, et al. (2005) Respiratory infections during SARS outbreak, Hong Kong, 2003. Emerging Infectious Diseases 15: 1738–41.

5. Wilder-Smith A, Low JGH (2005) Risk of respiratory infections in health care workers: lesson on infection control emerge from the SARS outbreak. Southeast Asian Journal of Tropical Medicine and Public Health 36: 481–488.

6. Wu J, Xu F, Zhou W, Feikin DR, Lin C-Y, et al. (2004) Risk factors for SARS among persons without known contact with SARS patients, Beijing, China. Emerging Infectious Diseases 10: 210–16.

7. Tang CS, Wong CY (2004) Factors influencing the wearing of facemasks to prevent the severe acute respiratory syndrome among adult Chinese in Hong Kong. Preventive Medicine 39: 1187–93.

8. World Health Organisation Writing Group (2006) Nonpharmaceutical Inter- ventions for Pandemic Influenza, International Measures. Emerging Infectious Diseases 12: 81–87.

9. World Health Organisation Writing Group (2006) Non-pharmaceutical Interventions for Pandemic Influenza, National and Community Measures. Emerging Infectious Diseases 12: 88–94.

With regards to our lovely two-party system, both sides (yes I know) typically only cite "science" when it suits them. In the defense of "the left" (sorry I hate talking about politics as if it's one-dimensional), it does seem like data supports their policies more often than it does the right, but again, a false dichotomy is the wrong way of looking at this.

Remove politics from the discussion and science is still facing a crisis: reproducibility crisis, proposing unfalsifiable theories, spending more time worrying about positive results than finding the truth, politics influencing science (not just the other way around as it should be), the profit-driven concerns of higher learning institutions, etc, etc.

Doesn't matter if said man on the street thinks the earth is flat, has a mental disorder or likes tennis more than soccer.

An institution should not be judged on the merits of the people judging them.

Also, people not wanting the government to force them what to do with their bodies is not quite the same as them not believing that there is a health risk when not wearing masks. Stop conflating the two. Engage the argument instead of the strawmen (or don't, but be honest about it.)

At the very least, they did a poor job of communicating this in the public sphere. The sound bites many Americans got was to not wear masks, which is quite different than "wearing masks is not a suitable substitute for social distancing". For better or worse, most Americans probably aren't going to search out CDC publications as their primary source for detailed information.

He has indicated PPE was part of the rationale:

"I don't regret anything I said then because in the context of the time in which I said it, it was correct. We were told in our task force meetings that we have a serious problem with the lack of PPEs,"

To be fair, he's been in a very difficult situation and I can only imagine the number of verbal miscues I would have made if placed in a similar scenario.

CDC isn't to blame for this. At this point there was a TON of political interference and bureaucratic restrictions on what they were allowed to say, and they were reined in very early. There were lots of entire careers and stuff some people call "my life's work" held in the lurch there.

I may be being too critical, but I think certain professions of public trust need to be held to higher standards in this regard. Meaning, while I can commiserate with the idea that careers hang in the balance, they owe it to the public to be honest. It's why certain roles are "professions" and not "jobs" (there is generally a professed oath to serve the public good). This is where I would hold them deficient in their communication and, unfortunately, a threat to a career isn't sufficient to avoid one's professed ethics. Misspeaking is one thing, misleading is another.

What I don't think is excusable is lying to the public as a public health official. The PPE part seems to show "We can't trust the public, so we should lie to them." It's an ends-justify-the-means position, which is a dangerous mindset in someone who influences public policy.

If it were just "a few missteps" that's one thing. Making the wrong call under uncertainty in a dynamically changing situation is excusable. Having the (lack of) ethics to think the appropriate response is to lie to the public is much less so.

I don't trust Fauci because of this. He lied, he doesn't see it that way, he he doesn't seem to acknowledge how it undermined trust.

I also don't like his approach. It's very preachy. That's not what we need right now. We need someone saying "please stay home, but we know some of you are going to see loved ones for the holidays, so we added testing capacity and locations so it's super easy to get tested."

You need tests and periods of isolation, with the periods of isolation being the more important component (that many people don't have much ability to choose right now).

What happens a lot is that people get tested, think they are safe, then after becoming infectious spend a bunch of time with people.

So advertising expanded testing isn't really a viable public health message.

I also expect that compliance wouldn't be all that high for at home testing (people skipping tests, deciding they still feel good enough, etc). It doesn't mean we shouldn't try to establish that access for people that would use it well though.

Also, there's a difference between working to increase testing so that more people do get tested before a holiday and making that the center of your message. They need to be careful to not mislead or give the impression that they are misleading, but they could limit the messaging to a statement about working to expand testing.

Back in March and April, I'd agree. It's December now, so there's no excuses for this. There's also no excuses for the problems with the vaccine rollout.

I have not looked at the lines you are talking of recently but I've never seen people unserved.

We have plenty of testing capacity and we are doing a LOT of testing.

https://abc7.com/coronavirus-testing-covid-dodger-stadium-ap...

Please tell me you've seen this yourself and not just read nonsense news about it.

Stating your rationale doesn't mean your rationale is backed up with evidence.

Again, top public health officials need to be held to a higher standard. That means understanding how populations behave, not just understanding the medicine. That means consistent messaging. The message throughout should've been:

> This is a dangerous virus, and the best way not to get it is to avoid contact with any other people at all. However, if you absolutely need to come into contact with other individuals, risk can be reduced if everyone is wearing a mask. Masks are not anywhere near 100% effective, but they do help, which is why you should be avoiding human contact and only be going out with a mask if absolutely necessary.

The problem has always been that this disease is very unusual in many different ways. This has quite understandably caused many best efforts at estimating it's behaviour to turn out to be wrong.

Messaging needs to be consistent and err on the side of caution... this was the exact opposite of both of those things.

SARS-CoV-2 is actually not that unusual – the mRNA COVID vaccines that have been developed are based on the spike protein that is common to all "coronaviruses" (hence the name) and was previously isolated from SARS-CoV-1 (i.e. SARS). At the very least we knew it was a coronavirus early on, so there is no reason you wouldn't assume it was respiratory in nature, just like SARS was.

> This is a coronavirus, just as SARS was before it. This one seems both more lethal and more contagious than SARS, so we are recommending everyone wears a face-mask (even one you've made yourself) when you go to any public place until we understand more about the virus.

etc. etc. etc.

Not "no need to wear a face mask".

This also to a large extent fuelled the anti-makser movement you have trouble reigning in now. Absolutely moronic.

https://www.thestreet.com/video/dr-fauci-masks-changing-dire...

And most anti-maskers are against it because of government overreach. Unrelated to science.

A third party has emerged. The "we'll believe and parrot anything because it's what we're told".

They act in the following realm (whether they are aware or not): Cotton/cloth masks don't work. But it qualifies as a mask so checkbox! Moral superiority is on my side whether science is or not doesn't matter.

Fauci lied (and admitted to it) that masks weren't effective and suggested that the average person should not wear them.

To be fair, I heard the whole medical community here (I'm in one of the largest medical centers in the world) laugh and scoff at normal people wearing masks (because they weren't trained and it isn't effective).

And now we have no N95 for the general public and idiotic cloth masks (that don't work).

So it turns out they weren't far off I their scoffing... But for the wrong reasons.

Now we see them (and other anto-science) normals flip and ignore the data on bad masks. "Something is better than nothing". False sense of security and just more lies and moral superiority.

Maybe all of the other examples of Americans coming together against a common threat from the last couple of centuries?

The messaging wasn't consistent. The POTUS ranted and raved on Twitter ad nausium about how its all a hoax.

Do you not remember the March lockdowns?

Everyone was saying that except Trump and the people in the Administration whose mouths he taped shut, next thought he'd look bad if a pandemic existed so he said things like "there's a dozen cases now, they'll be none soon; this will be over by Easter". Then when he was briefly reined in, we had a belated national effort to lockdown with "30 days to stop the spread".

Do you have citations for any of this stuff? Because I have seen places where Fauci and the CDC admitted that their main reason for discouraging masks was to prevent a run on PPE, and I've never seen one where they have explained that it was part of some broader strategy like this. In fact, my memory of the time where they were advising against masks is that social distancing was much less emphasized in the public health messaging than hand washing and avoiding face touching.

The reason Fauci (and others) said not to wear masks early on is because there was a shortage and they wanted to be sure medical professionals could have access to masks.

Medical professionals have known for a century that masks help prevent the spread of disease - particularly an airborne or aerosolized.

Policymaking and public health guidance is complex. There are details of the population's behavior that can't be fully controlled, but can be influenced, and maintaining credibility is crucially important here. Burning public trust with lies (or worse, basic inability to think critically under conditions of uncertainty) early on in the pandemic was a lot more damaging than the incidental effect of a cloth-mask recommendation on early N95 supply would have been.

[1] Worse than and more plausible than lies is simply incompetence. The medical industry is famously bad at critical thinking: I've known people who came out of (top-ranked) med school _less_ able to reason under uncertainty and deal with statistics, because of the culture of oversimplification they're indoctrinated with. I have no opinion on whether this is wise for the field overall, but it's an especially poor fit for a fast-moving, low-information environment like the early days of a pandemic.

Fauci should be tried at Hague.

If the virus is in microdroplets in your breath, something in front of your face when you breathe out is going to slow some of those droplets down, making them less likely to be inhaled by others nearby. This is just physics. If it can fog your glasses its helping. If it makes you smell your own breath its helping.

A scarf is better than nothing, just like a homemade mask is better than a scarf, just like a purpose built mask is better than a homemade one.

"This is just physics".

No this is just your intuition. Scarfs don't protect you or others. Neither do gaiters. This has been tested. They may work mildly for UV protection... But there you can be fooled as well.

They just don't work. N95s provide a level of protection but they are not full proof. The further away you move from N95 the more useless they get. Cotton etc. don't protect. They are overcome by physics.

But from his perspective (and it may have been not just his choice) what were the alternatives if his goal was to preserve frontline medical workers? (Regardless if this policy actually saved anyone).

I can see why it was done and at the same time feel lied to and that that is wrong.

Discussion: https://youtu.be/_2MmX2U2V3c

He did lie. He gave advice with ulterior motives.

This is a definition of ulterior motive.

I'm not making a judgement whether he was right/wrong by giving that advice (which the WHO did as well for the same reasons). Just pointing out that he did lie.

I personally don't like being lied to by people that represent a lot of power (doesn't matter what they're motives are. Lying is used to deceive for ulterior motives). That is just an indicator that I can't trust public facing scientists because the truth is not a priority, rather only the outcome that they desire (whether personally or as a group.) But that's not new.

Do you have have any evidence of this?

1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24229526/ - this is a paper from 2013 testing the efficacy of homemade masks versus surgical masks finding that both have some effect but surgical masks are better. If you look under "similar articles" you'll find 4 there about masks reducing the spread of airborne viruses from before 2020.

2. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20584862/ - demonstrates 2010 study showing the strong effect of N95s against small particles in the breath (on which the virus is borne) and comparing it to homemade masks. Concludes homemade masks would offer marginal protection. Again, in similar articles you'll see another three from before 2020 on the efficacy of masks.

Masks were well and widely known to be useful at slowing the spread of airborne contagions - especially N95 masks. People knew homemade masks had some effect too.

There was probably good reason to want to save N95's for medical professionals. There was no reason to say masks weren't helpful for the general public though, that was an absolute lie. Fauci and others had all the information they needed at the start of the pandemic and could have said "Masks are useful, that's why we need the best masks for our medical workers. We've put together information on how you can make homemade masks that are X% effective and what you can buy and use."

That's not evidence, but a claim that you provide no evidence for. Even if he was wrong, you don't have evidence that he made a mistake or that he lied.

> Masks are and were well understood to be useful in mitigating the spread of airborne contagions.

IIRC, most medical experts agreed with Fauci at the time. The analysis of someone on the Internet doesn't mean much.

What he said in March was that he didn't believe there was any reason for most fo the public to wear a mask, that's because he didn't have any evidence that it was effective at that time. Evidence is a reason, absence of evidence is not a reason for action. This is very simple. I happen to have thought even at the time that we should be wearing masks, but that was just an opinion and at that time the opposite opinion was also reasonable. We were still working things out.

Accusing him of lying in service of some conspiracy theory really is going too far.

In January/February 2020, there was about as much evidence for either of those propositions. The evidence on masks was thin, and limited to use by professionals in a medical setting. Existing studies of their use as practiced in parts of Asia were inconclusive.

Yes, I know: Masks seem like a really good idea. The whole concept makes sense. There's a theory as to how they work.

But medicine stopped believing any theory as to what may or may not be useful around a hundred years ago, after killing countless people with bloodletting, mercury, vapour-vaping, whatever... All those interventions may seem ridiculous to you, but they all followed some entirely believable logic that accounted for all the known facts as long as one did not actually run a double-blind trial.

It's instructive to look at the fate of two of those interventions: masks and that quinine. We now know the former works and the latter does not. And I'll be immodest and mention that I considered masks to be effective from day one, while spending only about a week drinking Gin Tonics for health reasons, until the full extend of the seediness of that French doctor pushing it became public (and I had to go back to a different set of reasons for the drinks).

But at about the same time along each treatment's timeline, there really was more actual, or at least claimed to be factual, evidence for the Malaria-malarky than there was for masks. And while I'm supremely excellent at predictioneering, I utterly fail when trying to distill some set of specific rules to follow.

Maybe there's wisdom in numbers? Do a survey in the US right now, and you'll probably get 55 % to advocate for masks, 42 % believing in the insect-repellant. And that's about four months after the science on those questions has been settled.

Zero credit to those who would equate all three or who would dismiss either of the latter two without diligent, unbiased investigation and solid empirical evidence.

But none of that is evidence in the double-blind trials sense of the word. And you're actually making my case: there was a plausible mechanism for hydroxychloroquine, as well as for masks. But only one of them works, while the other probably killed a few people, and wasted a whole lot of time.

Just because you don't understand how this virus spreads does not mean that we need a new trial before we can make a recommendation.

Quote from above:

Medicine also isn't in the "we recommend it because there aren't many reasons against it" business.

> Medicine also isn't in the "we recommend it because there aren't many reasons against it" business.

I'm not arguing with this. Who cares.

Doctors still recommend it, it still works and doctors still use it themselves.

How do you add absence of high-quality, narrow evidence for effectiveness + strong prior for effectiveness + ~zero-cost intervention and land at "don't recommend cloth face covering"?

All the other examples you gave fail one of these criteria: there's no prior suggesting that Crystal healing is valuable, HCQ has side effects and presents costs/supply chain challenges that _cloth_ doesn't, etc.

An example from the other side is vitamin D: there's been enough weak evidence that anyone scientifically literate has been keeping an eye on their vitamin D since the early pandemic, given that: there's moderate evidence it's protective + there's a high chance you're deficient anyway + D toxicity is pretty hard to achieve.

Medicine also isn't in the "we recommend it because there aren't many reasons against it" business. They neither recommended masks nor warned against them, but laid out the facts: "we don't (didn't) know. We're scrambling to get data. We'll let you know"

I'm honestly baffled that the concept of a trial is so alien to people, and that nobody seems to be capable of the tiny transference of recognising that masks are no different than a pill. I could come up with a possible reason Aspirin might work: maybe it's the fever that kills, Aspirin lowers it. The risk is known and rather small. Should medical science recommend everyone to take Aspirin? Does it seem entirely implausible that a significant number of people would say/think "It's not the best time for a wedding, but everyone has taken triple doses of Aspirin so it should be fine"

This is false.

> Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS!

> They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk! http://bit.ly/37Ay6Cm

--@Surgeon_General

https://mobile.twitter.com/surgeon_general/status/1233725785...

New medicines, requiring trials are novel.

Golden eggs and apples shouldn't be compared.

What new data has finally come in that has shown that masks do not slow the spread or that they do? And new we have guidance?

The problem here is that the medical community, when they have skin in the game wear and recommended masks, from day 1.

Again, the virus is novel, how it spreads is not.

The evidence on masks was thin, and limited to use by professionals in a medical setting

Go find a study showing the effectiveness of masks for prevention of infection in the general population published before 2020.

Also, given your arguments, what is your position on the efficacy of lockdowns vs. their negative effects?

Some news sources call out when they make mistakes and own up to them. And they get piled on for being wrong.

Other news sources (ahem...) say misleading stuff frequently and never correct it, never retract it and continue to mislead their audience.

This whole concept of pile one because someone admitted their wrong has to be the least healthy event I've ever seen. And yet instead of it going down as upholding editorial standards, it will be a case of "see they're wrong, don't trust them".

As an example, a significant portion of an American political party spent years believing (still believe last I checked) a former US president was born in Kenya.

This is technically true, but doesn't convey well that it was quite clear that N95 masks worked well, and he suggested they didn't work because they were in short supply and he wanted to preserve the ability of medical personnel to use them, not because there wasn't data that they worked. The data that came in were about cloth masks also being largely effective, thereby alleviating worries about a lasting shortage. Before that became apparent, Fauci was forced to choose between an immediate shortage of masks for hospital workers, and long-term credibility if such a situation arises again.

Because, for some reason, the US didn’t take the threat of COVID seriously until three months after it was discovered.

> The assignment, Mr. Flood recalled thinking, was both hopeless and quite strange in its specificity [...] Ms. Callimachi was singularly focused. “She only wanted things that very narrowly supported this kid in Canada’s wild stories,” he told me in a phone interview.

> Mr. Flood didn’t know it at the time, but he was part of a frantic effort at The New York Times to salvage the high-profile project the paper had just announced.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/11/business/media/new-york-t...

I think it does lend some credence to the claims that she was a reporter trying to massage the facts to fit a preconceived narrative.

Dr. Fauci works for a public health organization and nytimes is a for profit exchange listed company. So this comparison not fair.

The way I remember the mask debate is in March 2020 there was a shortage of PPE and health workers were in great need of masks. To avoid a mad rush of people hoarding masks just like they hoarded toilet paper, the Coronavirus Task Force was emphasising social distancing, hand washing more than wearing masks.

Now, the Caliphate story was outed as a lie by Canadian authorities. The nytimes did not verify their sources, they were caught lying which is why they had to retract their story.

This is a big difference.

I mostly agree, since I think the heart of your statement here is the times admitted they made a mistake, and that is good behavior. That's dead on.

I disagree a little bit, because I don't think they should be praised for acknowledging their mistake and correcting it: I think that's the minimum expectation we should have for journalists. I agree that it's a sign of integrity (professional integrity, specifically) to own your errors, but I don't think it's particularly courageous to do it; more that the opposite would be cowardly.

That isn't to say that the Times shouldn't be held to account when errors are found by others. It should, and so should every other publication. But when they find and retract their own errors, it is absolutely wrong to punish them at that moment.

But that's exactly what happened here. It wasn't the NYT who found the errors, unless I misread TFA.

So, in your "not to say"... That's exactly what you seem to be saying.

We should be praising five-year-olds for brushing their teeth, but from adults we expect it by default. And while NYT went down in quality in the last few years, let’s not treat it as if it is a five-year-old.

This isn't specific to this story, but it is truly bizarre that changing your opinions or beliefs based on new information is viewed as a negative trait by modern American society, especially in politics.

It's always fun to watch the tech bubble jump ugly on traditional media when it falters. Meanwhile, the front page of HN is full of Microsoft getting hacked by the Russians and Facebook pretending it exists to benefit society and democracy.

Fauci has said that he deliberately lied to people because he was afraid masks would be in short supply.

> "I don't regret anything I said then because in the context of the time in which I said it, it was correct. We were told in our task force meetings that we have a serious problem with the lack of PPEs and masks for the health providers who are putting themselves in harm's way every day to take care of sick people," Fauci told O'Donnell.

> "When it became clear that the infection could be spread by asymptomatic carriers who don't know they're infected, that made it very clear that we had to strongly recommend masks," he said.

> "And also, it soon became clear that we had enough protective equipment and that cloth masks and homemade masks were as good as masks that you would buy from surgical supply stores," Fauci added. "So in the context of when we were not strongly recommending it, it was the correct thing."

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/fauci-doesnt-regret-advising...

"Right now in the United States, people should not be walking around with masks"

"There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And, often, there are unintended consequences — people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face." - Dr Fauci, March 8th 2020

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRa6t_e7dgI

Ah, the old classic. Should we start by cutting off a pinky? Or maybe bamboo splinters, for an international flavor?

He has been clear that he was speaking before transmissibility was known. First there was "no reason," then there was a reason. It's not hard, if you're not trying to intentionally misrepresent his words for some reason.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XHC5Kxxv_w

“…when people were saying you don’t really need to wear a mask well the reason for that is that we were concerned the public health community and many people were saying this were concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment including the N95 masks and the surgical masks were in very short supply and we wanted to make sure that the people namely the health care workers who were brave enough to put themselves in a harm ways to take care of people who you know are infected with the corona virus and the danger of them getting infected we did not want them to be without the equipment that they needed so there was not enthusiasm about going out and everybody buying a mask or getting a mask we were afraid that that would deter away and the people who really needed it”

We can do both, praise and criticize. While I agree with your statements, they NYT also have another job: Report the news accurately. That's why they exist and it's critical to our society.

We shouldn't overreact to one error and I think the NY Times is generally more reliable than most. A metric for overall reliability would be very valuable, especially in the disinformation age. That would be an interesting project for a leading journalism school. But how to measure it? Omissions, including context, are just as significant inaccuracies as misstatements (imagine the story 'The U.S. declares war on Japan!' without context). How could the study objectively set a standard for what facts and context should be included?

Only that's not what happened. This is a bad analogy, or a good one depending on how you view the overt false narrative-creation of much of today's media. Fauci didn't "change his mind" with more evidence. He readily admits to overtly lying because he made a determination that some lives were more valuable than others. That. Is. Frightening.

This isn't intended to be a political statement, simply a fact that you are memory-holing.

When it first began to come to light that the subject was likely lying, the creator of the podcast actually said that he was likely telling the truth and it was instead the Canadian police that were incompetent because they couldn't "prove he'd gone to Syria" [0].

They were pretty clear they thought it was a true story. I don't think adding some mild disclaimers once it starts coming to light that the story is not true abdicates them from responsibility for what they put out there.

Even at the time, NYT bureau chiefs (ie. experienced war reporters) were uneasy about the nature of the podcast. Absolutely the Times should be praised for calling out their own errors, but it is definitely embarrassing and (in my opinion) should be career-ending or damaging for the architect of the podcast. She wanted it to be true, so she didn't dig.

[0]: https://twitter.com/rcallimachi/status/1309620500176556032

From what I understand he intentionally lied to the public because he wanted front line workers to get them first. This was doing the toilet paper panic. I believe he expressed this himself in an interview.

https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/prevention-c...

"He also acknowledged that masks were initially not recommended to the general public so that first responders wouldn’t feel the strain of a shortage of PPE."

Those aren't similar situations at all.

Fauci's comments are based on the data that's available at a particular time, about an ongoing, evolving situation, so it makes sense that his advice will change as the situation evolves.

On the other hand, this news story was was about a series of events that already happened and were no longer on going. All of the facts were out there but the journalists just didn't do their research.

So it's great that they're retracting the story, but they never should have published it in the first place.

Hilarious. I predicted "we should be praising them for 'admitting' their mistakes" was going to be the top comment. And here we are.

I bet you don't feel the same way about fox news or alex jones.

> This is akin to Fauci saying he didn't think we should be wearing masks, and changing his mind as more data came in.

It wasn't more data. It was politic pressure.

> Wanting people to never make them is impossible

Stop building up a straw man. Nobody is criticizing the NYTimes for not being perfect. People criticize NYTimes for being state propaganda. You know they spread pro-war propaganda and then "oops, we were wrong". Now praise us for admitting we were wrong bullshit. "Oops, our intentional lies/propaganda led to millions of dead men, women and children. But at least we are man enough to admit it" schtick that the dumb masses love.

Is this the standard we want for journalism though? There is so much that goes on in the world that doesn't get reported in the NYT which is backed by concrete evidence why do we need a speculative journalism?

Wont stop the bad faith actors who love to erode trust in reliable media so their own (flawed and dubious) views become more credible by comparison.

Absolutely — this is just basic "how humans work". Anyone complaining about this positive action (performed with the understanding of the PR cost) doesn't understand how to get what they purport to want in the world.

I'm of the opinion that, when it comes to journalism, courage and integrity are table stakes. They need not be praised because they are expected, and their absence should be ruthlessly punished. Even with this premise, one can tolerate mistakes and errors without needing to praise non-mistakes and non-errors.

The criticisms, however, are against their politically loaded decisions to run certain content in the absence of legitimate sources of truth. If this were an occasional thing, sure, accidents happen. But this has become the modus operandi of what once was the paper of record.

Between the absolute backpedaling of the 1619 Project, copious amounts of Russian influence narrative, and countless "anonymous sources" that turn out to be nobodies or absent integrity, the NYT is an embarrassment to journalism.

They do what you described, though: they build in back doors into their reporting so they can legitimately claim that they weren't "wrong" on a purely logical--but functionally bullsh*t--standing.

No, I don't believe they deserve "praise" for "courage and integrity", because they've left those--and other markers of high character--in the past as they cry their death throes in the changing media landscape.