Why I hate the Daily Mail, as distilled into one edition

yeah, the 'back off' is a little weak - imo it's because there's a kind of fatalistic unreason at the back of the lecture, which is both its strength & a limit - I think she thinks this kind of story plays out as it must.

Why's it taken two weeks for this to come into contention, I wonder?

LRB article was published in hard copy end of last week, giving time for Mail hacks to do hatchet job early this week.

Aha.

ajhsdljdluegfliedfl ed miliband has weighed in

our entire political establishment is stupid and illiterate

The best either Cameron or Miliband could have done was to say nothing about it at all, and concentrate on actual issues affecting the UK. But politicians today don't know how, or when, to shut up.

yeah, I got a little wrapped up in defending the lecture there, but just so much ridiculous about this whole affair, especially now the really pointless noise-making from politicians.

Good for the LRB though, that's something.

Page hits bruv

Ed says her comments were offensive. I can sort-of see him being politically offended even by a correct reading of it. How dare she say that our establishment objectifies royalty and reduces it to meaningless ciphers etc etc. Bet he doesn't mean that, though.

LRB article was published in hard copy end of last week, giving time for Mail hacks to do hatchet job early this week.

think there was a specific lrb speech/lecture in the last couple of days this was linked to. article was ok I thought, nothing special but a bit of a coup for the lrb and clearly coming from the angle of how to interpret the metamorphosing of a concept rather than a personal attack. language sailed close to personal attack in tone, I thought as much as anything out of a desire to get a bit of argument/angle to the piece, but on the whole I subscribe to lex's illiteracy/mail anger manufacture. there's a question I guess of how much mantel or agent, say, could have foreseen this, courted it even. I suspect not much. "Author writes article in lrb" not much of a story in book world after all.

the article is her lecture from 2 weeks ago - I think that might explain some of its phrasing and structure - I'm sure she wrote it carefully and planned to publish, but it was for delivery to a room of LRBish people.

On the foreseeing… yeah, I strongly suspect that, despite the recent cheques, trophies, etc, she still thinks of herself as the sort of literary author no-one outside the books pages pays much attention to (because that's she was for twenty years) & that the LRB is a quiet enough little space to follow through a thought.

and I mean she's basically right, this feels like a freak incident based on a Dacre-whim or something.

from the bbc article

David Sillito Arts Correspondent

Hilary Mantel has been accused of describing the Duchess of Cambridge as "a shop window mannequin with no personality of her own". However, read the speech and it's clear she is in reality defending the duchess.

The list of accusations is actually a list of the "threadbare attributions" she says were presented in the press about Kate Middleton.

It is a long speech and its subject is the way royal women have been portrayed and maligned over the centuries. Hilary Mantel says we treat the Royal Family like pandas, staring at them as if they are in a cage.

Her fear is that we become like "spectators at Bedlam. Cheerful curiosity can easily become cruelty. It can easily become fatal".

That word "fatal" is a reference to Princess Diana who, she says, "we" drove to destruction. Her conclusion is that we have now a chance to be different.

She concludes: "I'm not asking for censorship. I'm not asking for pious humbug and smarmy reverence. I'm asking us to back off and not be brutes."

If this is an attack on anyone it is the press not the Duchess of Cambridge.

she's right, we should let them go into the wild and take their gilded cages and enormous personal fortunes off them, for their own good

Her angle on diana taken by itself is rubbish for a start

idk i liked it. but i kind of didn't believe she was that taken in by the national grieving over diana, and was using "we" very metaphorically.

hope i'm not blowing up his spot by posting this:

http://tomewing.tumblr.com/post/43494992485/diana-was-spared-at-least-the-prospect-of

which i also thought was pretty good

Cant find a why i hate the bbc thread but i feel this somehow belongs in here anyway
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-21511904

Why have the white British left London?

And?

thats the headline

I assume the answer is to get away from the rest of the white british in london.

you're one of those nasty scots taking jobs away from patriotic white englishmen, tom ;)

Finally a detailed statisical analysis of the aspirations and lifestyle changes of *my* demographic. oh no wait i'm not working class, can we get one for white british middle class single straight cis males plz?

Scottish is not British?

That article is a perfectly reasonable look at census data and shifts in British working class patterns of residency, a legitimate topic IMO.

should have said "white British" above, obv.

though I did laugh at this picture apparently denoting some white people, yesterday

http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/65966000/jpg/_65966407_149794837.jpg

Couple of Rangers fans no doubt

... no, hold on, they're smiling

maybe Orangemen with bowler hats just oiut of shot

but again the smiling would indicate not

The white British article is pretty reasonable, but by posing it as a question in that maddening way that News Online does with everything now, they sort of stoke unpleasantness.

That piece wouldn't make it into a newspaper imo. Not in its colloquial, here's some shit I just found, way. I think if the top line of a feature is a question it's likely to be shit, nine times out of 10, and you just wouldn't get away with it in a proper paper. Beeb's feature writing is fucked tho, they don't know what they're at with no background as a paper.

LOL @ the comments below the article tho

Oh stay away from the comments

i don't care if you're white, black, red white and blue, purple...

They invade our space, and we fall back. They assimilate countless Cities, and we fall back. Not again. Not this time. The line must be drawn here! This far, no farther! - Jean-Luc Picard, Captain, USS Enterprise.

We have mass unemployment and have done for 30+ years, a housing & energy crisis. Our welfare system cannot cope, our prisons are full & parts of our transport system are past capacity.

Fire photon torpedoes at Newham.

He's not racist, he has a Klingon Lieutenant on his ship.

ah Beverley, won't you join me for a glass of racist synthahol?

Holodeck enable antebellum South programme.

hilarious mishap when Jordi gets accidentally lynched

"Wesley, tell me, where was your father born?"

guys stop making me laugh at work

have always been amused by the TOS's depiction of a world where people from all races and cultures work aboard the enterprise but it's ok for Bones to sling racist slurs at Spock all day long

in a way it's like BBC News article comment threads

Holy shit bones and spock are fergie and wenger how did this no occur to me til now

Wd like to see something similar to the Wrath of Khan denouement between those two.

A brief image search turns up the revelation that there's a lot of Trek slash fiction out there.

Kirk/Spock was possibly the original "slash" fiction.

yeah BB, that stuff must predate the net

That article is a perfectly reasonable look at census data and shifts in British working class patterns of residency, a legitimate topic IMO.

ok but how is shit like this necessary

Some white British may have moved because their neighbourhood has been culturally transformed, the tea rooms and restaurants replaced by takeaway chicken shops and halal supermarkets serving the new arrivals.

And the pic of the Polish pub and "Polish is the second most common language spoken in England" which is the only mention of Polish people in the whole article?