Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

What has actually happened this week other than Liz Truss reiterating in a Radio 4 interview that they haven't changed their plan to replace the HRA with a bill of rights? The Canary frames this as a "bombshell" that the MSM are hiding from you, but it's only a bombshell if you were convinced by this unspecified "speculation" that the government was set to change course.

The Canary's whole MO is hyped-up clickbait headlines but why would you not want to keep on reminding people how vile the government is?

As far as nhs cuts go, I don't know another way of saying 'his is what happens when you vote Tory, and people have been telling you that most of your lives and you don't listen'. It's profoundly depressing. A bunch of Tory voters in the pub today saying that's wasn't what they voted for the Tories for.

had a convo with my brother on Wednesday about how can we find hope for a better world in the light of the way people approach their vote and the political system in general?

didn't word that right - the general tenor of the convo was "how to even think about this stuff without massive depression?"

It's odd, because it makes me (and I think most people) uncomfortable to start talking about the psychology of convincing people to do certain thing. We maybe like to frame it as 'communicating truths'. But relying on the the 'virtue of our message' to necessarily convince people seems like a doomed enterprise.

I gave up a long time ago on the notion that my political beliefs were in any sense provably "right". I guess at best I might argue that the kind of society I want would benefit the greatest number of people, but even that would be v debatable. in the end I simply have class interests and think the number of people who are in the same broad class as me is far greater than its members realise

but anybody who believes in nuance and complexity and moral philosophy has to do a lot of breath-holding to engage with parliamentary democracy as is

But even accepting a realpolitik view, I have no idea how you would counter the current forcings.

I don't think you'll carry millions of people with you by saying "what you think you understand about your own best interests is wrong", that's for sure

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3z-a5hy7QO8

an ilx favourite that feels painfully true about politics as it plays thru the media in 2016

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/10/zero-hours-contracts-worse-jobs-for-life-work-unions?utm_term=Autofeed&CMP=soc_3156

Makes u think.

Deborah Orr working hard to be challopian in chief

fucking blinkered moron needs exiling to Hartlepool for 20 years.

It is good to see the Graun strengthening their case as bastion of high quality journalism that is worth paying for again tho

so if you're in a handsomely-paid middle class job flexibility of working hours might be a positive? ouch, my mind.

Guardian journalist - there's a job for life, these cunts walk out of one job straight into another like it's fuckin' 1952 or something.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/09/zero-hours-contracts-lousy-recovery

This is from a few years ago. I would like to navigate through Debz's confused mind but I have things, i.e. work, to do.

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2016/sep/13/the-great-british-bake-off-disaster-why-the-bbc-got-burned

Mark Lawson puns, the stubbed toes of prose

http://www.private-eye.co.uk/issue-1427/street-of-shame

https://www.theguardian.com/guardian-masterclasses/2016/aug/09/how-to-find-a-partner-using-social-science-a-masterclass-in-flirting-with-social-cultural-anthropologist-jean-smith

£49 for a Guardian Masterclass on flirting in which you get to learn the H.O.T. A.P.E. technique. ILX FAP anybody?

I've been without enough hot apes wot

The fuck kind of autocorrect appends 'out' ffs

Is that Hot Ape or Ho Tape?

ridiculous animal acronyms

Learn why it’s essential to incorporate social science into your partner search

is it tho?

indeed xp

gives you somebody else to blame when you get repeatedly shot down

Through my scientific research into the flirting behaviour of the inhabitants of London, NY, Paris, and Stockholm, I have determined there are six universal signs of attraction

checking out hot apes in western metropolitan areas = universal fuckwant behaviour

IT'S SCIENCE

London NY Paris Stockholm
Everybody's talkin' 'bout
HOT APES

Humour
Open body language
Touch

Touch (again)
Attention
King-sized dick
Eye contact

love it when a woman with a king-sized dick makes that eye contact

I confess I find myself deeply torn on this most radioactive of topics. My every instinct is to stand with those who defend migrants and migration. Like so many others, I am the son of a mother born outside this country. A mere glance at my family tree shows the earliest roots were planted in soil far away from here. When I hear anti-immigration rhetoric I know that, 100 years ago, the target of such talk would have been me.

And yet, I cannot ignore what Rayner, Reeves and the rest are saying. None of them is a racist. None hates migrants. None of them would, I believe, be calling for increased controls on immigration if they could see another option. But they are simply listening to what has become the settled will of the people they represent.

Corbyn himself said there should be no “lecturing or patronising” of those who voted leave, that “we have to hear their concerns,” including on immigration. That goes for him too – but he may not like what he hears.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/oct/01/immigration-brexit-labour-jeremy-corbyn

this is all very depressing. I kind of thought that Freedland was better than this? I guess this is the new post-Brexit reasonable moderate consensus? If nothing else this increases my confidence that I was right to vote for Corbyn in these two leadership elections despite all of his failings, because I have no doubt that Burnham, Cooper, Kendall and lol Owen Smith would all be following the line Freedland sets out here.

it's has been the moderate consensus for a long time and is always addressed in only the most moderate of ways: "we have to listen to people's legitimate concerns" without offering elaboration and the usual "it's important that we have this debate" without a debate being commenced or even outlined.

freedland is terrible and has always been.

Freedland has always been a centrist/new-labourite, and maybe I'm giving him too much credit, but I really do think that he would have baulked at writing something like this pre-Brexit, especially the bit where he straight up admits that the public's problem with immigration is not so much the impact on wages or services, but the "more nebulous, and more toxic, questions of culture and identity". There does seem to have been a shift where folks who would have defended immigration before are conceding that UKIP has basically won this argument and we all should just give up.

like, a shift from "it's important that we have this debate" to "we've lost the debate and have to accept that", but as you say there never has been an honest "debate" on this subject

Toynbee was saying similar last week about Corbyn - essentially that he's right about immigration and she agrees with him but he shouldn't be saying it because the argument has been lost.

the backlash to Diane Abbott even *suggesting* that racism may have been a factor in some ppl's decision to vote Leave seems to show why it's nearly impossible to have an honest, frank "public conversation" or whatever on this subject. I don't know how you start to change that in a culture where "politician suggesting some voters may be racist" = deeply offensive and elitist, but "politician pandering to voter's irrational dislike of immigrants" = courageous, hard-headed realism.

49 quid for racism

if you think about politics in showbiz terms, you never insult the crowd, ever. you can insult individuals, but never beliefs that more than one individual shares. you have to puff the audience up, it's iron law. and by the property of transference, dinging a politician who's bigging up the crowd (by pandering to "very real concerns" or indeed whatever it is that they're saying about their constituents) amounts to the same thing.

on a similar theme:

In a further sign of the continued resistance to Corbyn’s leadership despite another thumping victory, Richard Angell, director of Progress, the so-called modernising group in the party, has written to subscribers of the organisation’s magazine, claiming the Labour leader had in his speech managed to call “a lot of the public racist”.

“I bow to no one in my liberal pro-immigration views but to suggest that to have any policy other than recreating the Migration Impact Fund is the politics of ‘racism and division’ is a cul-de-sac for Labour,” he writes. “Cue the trolls having said this, but it is true. In reality, this was another way of calling a lot of the public racist.”

but a lot of the public *are* racist, though! Angell and Progress *have* pushed back against some of the anti Freedom of Movement noises Reeves at al have been making, here for example -http://www.progressonline.org.uk/2016/09/19/no-compromise-with-reality/ - but their whole analysis seems broken-backed, warped by this shibboleth that it's automatically wrong to imply that voters are racist and consequent wilfully blind refusal to acknowledge that racism plays any role in anti-immigration sentiment

i guess i'd just say.... and? what does it achieve to say "sooo many voters are racist!" how does that get you to point B?

it gives you an aspirational demographic to pursue with third way progressive racist policies

"for less than a price of coffee a week, you could secure The Guardian's future"

I drink Nescafe so fuck off.

i guess i'd just say.... and? what does it achieve to say "sooo many voters are racist!" how does that get you to point B?

― illegal economic migration (Tracer Hand), Sunday, October 2, 2016 11:29 AM (twelve minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I don't know, but it just seems like part of the reason why discourse around this issue is so toxic, why there has been a failure to have an "honest debate" around this immigration like people are always saying there should be, is that everything politicians say about it is contorted by this requirement to dent that racism is a factor? so no one pushes back against the problem because they can't even acknowledge that there is a problem, and instead you get avoidance and double-speak and pandering which just makes the voters more cynical and the whole thing more malignant

to *deny* that racism is a factor, rather

Gosh, what would happen if, say, a US Presidential candidate were to describe a large chunk of the electorate as a 'basket of deplorables', for example? They would have no chance of being elected.

In a two horse race you only have to be better than one horse

i think there are plenty of ways to say that racism is a massive destructive issue in society but make your audience feel that they are, or can be, part of the solution rather than part of the problem. even if they are part of the problem.

the only people this bullshit doublespeak helps are moderates who are looking for excuses to connect with UKIP voters with a justifying caveat that thick fucking racists are a legit voice

Thick fucking racists being in the minority here, and that includes among those ignorant proles, despite what the Guardian thinks.