>>>>>>But it is a great American tradition, seeing communism in anything one doesn't like. Only yesterday I heard comments quoting someone important (on the radio, didn't memorize the names) shouting "it's socialism!" about the government bailouts. And this thing about condemning without reading is exactly what was done to Dušan Makavejev and his movie "WR or mysteries of organism" in 1971. There was a whole campaign to condemn a movie which nobody saw.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>Why did you feel the need to insert "conspiracy" into this? There's nothing clandestine here, it's so open. We're talking about method here ("manner" as I put it). It's just a simple political fight, getting the oponent's views summarily dismissed by labeling them as this or that, and having one whole house and anything that it publishes thrown out the window by the masses so that they have no voice in further discussion but to try to defend themselves. That's no conspiracy, it's simple labeling.
>>>>>
>>>>>But isn't it you always stating that socialism != communism?
>>>>
>>>>It is not, but I have pretty much given up on explaining the distinction. Specially in this context where it's just about using communist (party) style witchhunt methods to condemn a newspaper (NYT in this case).
>>>>
>>>>>How could you assume that calling the bailouts 'socialism' is an attack on communism?
>>>>
>>>>That's the reduction of the whole theory of liberation, additional human rights etc to a practice of one (bad) implementation, of statist planned economy. That's as if any mention of VFP was of a "tool with corrupt memo fields", or of Microsoft as "the inventors of Clippy", of EU as "the bureaucratic mastodon" etc etc.
>>>>
>>>>And this wasn't an attack - it was just a post festum mention of a whole school of such reductionist thought, where the "guilty by association" is taken to extreme. The main attack was over long ago, and it made sure that no such ideas circulate around here, that the only mentions of socialism are those with either negative connotations or those that would lead to the conclusion that it can't work. Any discussion is reduced to discussion of stalinism; as if nothing else existed. When government bailout of a failed shop is decried as socialism, the whole idea of socialism is reduced to statism, government control of everything.
>>>>
>>>>The reason I started to talk about this was Ed's manner of dismissing whatever NYT says as leftist, therefore inadmissible as biased, which strongly resembled the manner our Party dealt with Makavejev and the so-called "black wave" movie directors at the time. Which I thought was actually funny, seeing such a believer in free stock market as him apply that kind of method... on NYT, of which I think as "right-wing and not quite sure whether they can be trusted".
>>>
>>>Your political myopia shows again. I said that people have right to select what to read and what to think. It does not mean that you (or your paper) is a victim of persecution and mandated to conform. You have full right to have your ideas, and I have full right to have my opinion about your ideas, regardless you like it or not.
>>
>>But of course. I was only expressing my opinion about your methods - i.e. not what you said, but how. At that, I found them similar to some other methods. Anything beyond that was only to clarify any misunderstanding as to what I meant.
>>
>>I still find it funny that you deem NYT to be leftist... de gustibus non est disputandum, indeed.
>
>http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9d01e7d8173df936a15754c0a9629c8b63
>
>THE PUBLIC EDITOR; Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?
>
>OF course it is.
>
>
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times
>
>The Times has been accused of having either a liberal or a conservative bias.[54][55][56][57][58][59] According to a 2007 survey of public perceptions of major media outlets, 40% believe the Times has a liberal slant and 11% believe it has a conservative slant.[60] In December 2004 a University of California, Los Angeles study gave the Times a score of 73.7 on a 100 point scale, with 0 being most conservative and 100 being most liberal.[61] The validity of the study has been questioned by various organizations, including liberal media watchdog group Media Matters for America.[62] In mid-2004, the newspaper's then public editor (ombudsman), Daniel Okrent, wrote a piece in which he concluded that the Times did have a liberal bias in coverage of certain social issue such as gay marriage. He claimed that this bias reflected the paper's cosmopolitanism, which arose naturally from its roots as a hometown paper of New York City. Okrent did not comment at length on the issue of bias in coverage of "hard news", such as fiscal policy, foreign policy, or civil liberties, but did state that the paper's coverage of the Iraq war was insufficiently critical of the George W. Bush administration
>
>It's not as though Ed is alone in his thinking... :)

Very interesting. What Daniel Okrent wrote makes a lot of sense. Maybe part of the disconnect I have been having with so many in this thread is that I was thinking of politically liberal and others may be thinking of socially liberal. I'm sure there is some correlation there but they are not the same thing.