Rubio stages font coup: Times New Roman ousts Calibri

Is it "signalling" when the left's change was for an accessibility reason, to enable more people to be able to easily read? Signaling means there's no tangible benefit to the change, so the Blinken's switch to a sans-serif font would not be signaling.

Rubio, however, specifically pointed out the symbolic (and malicious) gesture of his whole switch back to Times New Roman.

The left didn't react pettily. Please stop thinking the left are the right are the same when the facts show they are not. The left's change was for a demonstrative benefit. The right is doing it so fuck over people. You think these are the same.

I think the concept of an accessible font is signaling. I don't think that Times New Roman is actually less legible than Calibri, and have never seen research claiming to find that Times New Roman in particular or serifs in general pose accessibility problems.

I easily found some research by searching Google scholar:

https://www.scitepress.org/Papers/2021/109668/109668.pdf

It's not a big difference, but apparently TNR was the worst of the fonts tested for OCR.

But anyway, there was no "signaling" about the change to Calibri. No-one ever tried to make a political issue out of it the way Rubio is now.

"Decisions I know nothing about are signaling" is a phenomenally uncurious approach to life.

I’m not sure what you think I mean by “signaling”. This is a study of OCR performance, with no attempt to measure practical accessibility issues caused by the font difference which you and I agree is not big. I’m still very skeptical that even a single State Department employee’s ability to do a good job depends on which font the department uses.

If you say that it doesn’t matter whether changing the font had a large practical impact, because it’s a gesture in the right direction or helps build a culture of accessibility, I would classify that as signaling.

Classify it how you like, but a gesture towards building a culture of accessibility (if indeed that’s what this was) is hardly comparable to an attempt to score points against political opponents.

Note that, even if that's all true (and I do agree that studies should have been conducted), the two positions are:

a) We made this change because we think it will help certain people

and

b) We made this change because we fundamentally disagree with attempts to help certain people, whether effective or not

I think b) is a lot worse than a). Or, to put it another way, has the current administration demonstrated a benefit from this change, or are they behaving at least as badly as "the left"?

No, you're just falling into the sort of left wing "people who disagree with me can only do so because they are a bad person" trap. You can read the full text of the actual memo (and a reasonable interpretation of it) below, but it appears to me that the principle reason as stated is that Calibri is less professional, inconsistent with all other government communications and even inconsistent letterheads on the very same department's material, and that appearance matters. It isn't in fact about "sticking it to the woke", but it does seem like the original decision to use Calibri was not based on anything and just about appearing to be woke.

https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/full_text_of_marco_rubio_...

> No, you're just falling into the sort of left wing "people who disagree with me can only do so because they are a bad person" trap.

I'm not sure where this conclusion came from. I even acknowledged that the original change was problematic.

> the principle reason as stated is that Calibri is less professional

That's fair, but it doesn't erase the 'DEI' comment in the memo. If that weren't there, we might actually be having a discussion about the merits of one font vs. another.

> It isn't in fact about "sticking it to the woke"

Again, that might be believable if the memo hadn't explicitly complained about DEI.

DEI was mentioned in a footnote, it didn't seem to be the main thrust of the memo. I agree it would have been better to not mention it at all, the decision is perfectly defensible on the basis of all the previous non-footnoted points.

I apologise for my first comment, it seems like those critical of the latest decision are painting a simplistic picture - "this was one side attempting to be kind vs other side deliberately being unkind". But it doesn't appear to be the case to me.

>Is it "signalling" when the left's change was for an accessibility reason, to enable more people to be able to easily read?

Uh, yes.