Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

My library stock a copy of The Sleepwalkers because of me :-)

I thought Clark's book alluded to the novel. xp

I couldn't get through The Sleepwalkers. I must be stupid.

The novel is ok-ish. Loved some of the last part but when I tried to re-read the first part it was a tad mundane.

Garcia opened investigations into the conduct of five individuals during the bidding process including three current executive committee members – √Ångel Mar√-a Villar Llona of Spain, Belgium’s Michel D’Hooghe and Thailand’s Wowari Makudi

http://i.guim.co.uk/static/w-620/h--/q-95/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2014/12/19/1419018001125/2b8d711f-ee90-405b-bbb8-92034cd9aee9-620x372.jpeg

What we’ve learned from a year in webchats …
4 comments

to return to ww1, the guardian helpfully publishes a shit article by congenital moron and prison rape apologist michael white about why someone who died 16 years before it began is, actually, to blame

http://www.theguardian.com/world/blog/2014/dec/31/bismarck-escaped-blame-first-world-war

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jan/04/is-your-five-year-old-bigot-racist

Was a very sensible article, I thought.

yeah, it really is. did you read beyond the headline, neil?

This jumped out at me:

But isn’t the most likely explanation that they heard these choice phrases from the adults around them

Possibly. But it seems at least equally likely that they learned them from other children, who in turn learned them from other children, in a chain that eventually stretches back to an adult some time in the dim past.

I say this because schoolyards have an oral tradition and a culture which is preserved by kids and is passed on from kid to kid. That oral tradition contains a lot more than rope-skipping rhymes. It includes taunts and a lot of similar ugly stuff. The major criterion for a taunt to survive and thrive on a playground is that it is effective; it hurts; it belittles; it is a weapon that cuts the taunted kid in a tender spot. Racist taunts fit that criterion very well.

But it doesn't really matter how or from whom the racist taunts are learned, because the point is for the adults to teach the kids to stop using them, even though the kids obviously know them and know how to use them. That's just SOP for any responsible elementary school teacher.

guilty as charged, didn't get past the clickbait title and URL

now I've read it, it's fair enough I suppose

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/dec/31/david-duke-former-ku-klux-klan-leader-steve-scalise

Guardia also had this David Duke interview, which annoyed me a bit. Aw, he regrets having been a Grand Dragon in the Klan. They're taking him at his word. As if he's somehow better now.

Still if you're not from the US you can learn about David Duke.

Read between the lines and there's no way they're taking him at his word. It's a deadpan give-em-enough-rope interview with lots of damning quotes from Lawrence Powell. You don't need the writer to step in and say "BTW I think he's a racist" to get the message.

Is it a good idea for the Guardian to reprint the Charlie Hebdo cartoon of Muhammad on their website right now?

yes

Violence does not legitimise racism in the guise of 'free speech', so quite obviously not.

They might have removed it, my colleague can't see it but it's still on my browser, maybe cached.

The Guardian picture in question was someone holding the paper with the cartoon on the front, which doesn't seem massively controversial in context. The suggestion (being repeated by half of Twitter) that all papers in Europe should republish the full set of cartoons as a point of principle would be different, though. The objective of terrorist outrages like this isn't just to cow publications into silence, it's to provoke an 'us vs them' reaction to further alienate the Muslim minority.

They do seem to have removed it though.

it's to provoke an 'us vs them' reaction to further alienate the Muslim minority

If there isn't a right-wing protest later I'll eat my chapeau :(

it's to provoke an 'us vs them' reaction to further alienate the Muslim minority

What gives you that idea? Not being snarky, generally interested. Because I don't see why they would think that provoking an "us vs. them" reaction is going to help their cause.

More people offended by cartoons / hostile rhetoric = more money / support / recruits.

Their objective is to show Muslims that there is no place in French / British / American / Russian society for them so they should fight for a central united cause. They have even less to gain from harmonious multiculturalism than the far right.

Again, not being snarky but that just sounds like speculation on your part. Without some kind of statement from them to that effect (unlikely, I realise) I'll stick with the "cow publications into silence" rationale.

Is that any more than speculation on your part, anagram? (I too am not trying to be snarky, but SV's assumptions above matched mine.)

Individually, it's possible that could have been the motivation - we won't know until they're caught. In the context of a wider multi-national, multi-organisation terrorist campaign that has constantly sought to generate hostility on both sides with a view to convincing the disaffected / marginalised to sign up, it's not much of a stretch.

It seems like a stretch to me, much more so than the idea that they just want to stop publication of "offensive" material. And I'm not sure I buy the idea that the wider terrorist campaign has "constantly sought to generate hostility on both sides with a view to convincing the disaffected / marginalised to sign up" either.

There's an awful lot of stuff you could dismiss without an obvious statement which is pretty bleeding obviously the case. Seems like a strange rule to me. While it might not have been the attackers' main motivation, if you ever got the chance to have an honest chat with them, perhaps they'd call it a nice bonus.

remember when Oslo got bombed and those teenagers got shot, and everyone said "oh those Islamists" and it turned out to be a neo-Nazi?

why is this being discussing in the guardian thread? srs question, is there a guardian component to this that i've missed?

no it was a jumpoff from this post

Is it a good idea for the Guardian to reprint the Charlie Hebdo cartoon of Muhammad on their website right now?

― Just noise and screaming and no musical value at all. (Colonel Poo), Wednesday, January 7, 2015 12:01 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I don't see why they would think that provoking an "us vs. them" reaction is going to help their cause.

Genuinely astonished by this statement.

sharivari's interpretation is good from an instrumental sense - if you believe that cohesion + integration are the ways to defeat fundamentalism it makes sense to contextualize any attack as a way to provoke "us vs them" bc then the response is obv, do whatever you can to not let "us vs them" become a thing. but i'm not sure it's a sound argument vis-a-vis reality - this fits into a broader pattern of censorship in Islamic countries / fatwa against rushdie / Jyllands-Poste / Lars Vilks. claiming that it's not really about censorship but actually about some political strategy to increase recruitment / funding / extremism is pretty incredible imho.

He didn't actually say that though.

he did actually say that

"More people offended by cartoons / hostile rhetoric = more money / support / recruits.

Their objective is to show Muslims that there is no place in French / British / American / Russian society for them so they should fight for a central united cause. "

Yeah but he didn't say that was the motivation for this particular attack.

it's kinda a twin argument w/ the idea that bin laden wanted to provoke the US into attacking afghanistan so that he'd get more recruits, or that IS beheaded journalists so that the West would attack them + they'd gain legitimacy. i don't doubt that these Western responses might turn out to be advantageous for radical terrorist organizations, but i find all of those 11-dimensional chess explanations for terror pretty silly.

It's not an either / or. There's censorship but there's also a significant amount of signal-boosting from Islamists - spreading the offensive material to ensure that as many people can be outraged as possible. It's perfectly plausible that individual terrorists might be motivated by an effort to censor but to the extent that there's any organised, strategic thinking involved in the broader span of current terrorism, that's clearly not the only rationale. There has been a constant effort to draw groups / governments into conflict, rather than prevent it.

I interpreted it as Not Only But Also

but is that bc they think that Western responses will help galvanize their recruiting or bc they legitimately believe that they are fighting a war against the [decadent] West?

Both, i think.

remember when Oslo got bombed and those teenagers got shot, and everyone said "oh those Islamists" and it turned out to be a neo-Nazi?

No I don't remember everyone blaming Islamists actually.

really? Difficult to verify now but my recollection was a lot of media talk about Islamists, at least in the immediate aftermath of the attacks.

I looked up some old news reports and they all said it was too early to say. iirc Breivik was identified pretty quickly so there wasn't a huge window for speculation. Obviously I can't dig up Twitter reactions from that window but I don't remember many people claiming it was Islamists, only some wondering whether it might be.

fair dos. I did find this on Twitter, lol Denis MacShane: https://twitter.com/DenisMacShane/status/94437818050412545

Anyway I suppose my point is: yes it's likely to be "Islamists" but it's probably too soon to usefully speculate about motives etc.

According to reports, two of the gunmen identified themselves as Al Qaeda.

Heard about a car bombing in front of a synagogue? Obv no idea if related.

fine, speculate away

It's so hard to believe that this was done in the name of the religion of peace