Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

Website Q&A gone wrong

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have just had a chat with NYR.

Unfortunately, despite previous assurances that they would be participating in this blog post, I've now been told they 'will not be taking part in the debate'.

Comments are now closed for this entry.

Neals Yard running a mile on that one. Seemed to be quite some vitriol in some of the comments there.

can't really blame Neal's Yard Remedies for running miles at the sight of those comments mentalists xp

wait you're calling the commenters the mentalists? radical switcheroo there. i know people get excited when they get to pick on homeopathy but can y'blame them? also they were fairly well behaved for the most part.

my bus has crashed - I've got a compound fracture in my right leg, the bone is sticking out from under the skin and is wedged into the 'Used Tickets' receptacle, my skull has had a good old thump against the seat in front and is impersonating a boiled egg after the first thump with the teaspoon, and my ribs have been broken into bits like a packet of smokey bacon crisps someone has stood on.

What herbs and aromatic oils would you recommend?

(xp) I dunno, there was quite a display of Dawkinsishness. By which I mean, sure they're right, but telling us once each might've been enough.

But then again NY is not some misunderstood underdog, no, and it is pretty hilarious that this was in the "ethical living" section, and speaking out against profiteering at the expense of public health is obviously a good thing... just please don't ever be in the same pub as me, thanks folks.

We really need a 'Rolling Self-Inflicted PR Clangers For Companies Who Don't Understand The Internet' thread. See also the Telegraph's Budget Twitterfail.

Whatever one thinks of NYR (I'd never even heard of them before today, don't give a shit about them based on the little I have read) the sheer pomposity of a lot of those comments is headache-inducing! Some real "when did you stop beating yr wife" level "debate", eh.

It's a bit like rolling up at Barney the Dinosaur's website and laughing at 4 year-olds for believing he's real.

I think I had some NYR moisturiser that was OK. It smelt of violets.

I was browsing in Neal's Yard once and overheard the sales guy talking to another customer, talking about some non-"natural" products and saying "no wonder there's so much cancer in the world" with a sigh. I never went back in there. Also that stuff with the malaria remedy is indefensible.

agree with the criticisms but these dawkinsist/"i read bad science" people are such fucking ultra-bores.

I ws talking about this w/my wife, she had some vague memory of buying neal's yard organic sultanas from holland & barrett but as it turned out they weren't quite proper organic in some way. the details are vague. iirc they tasted nice, but sultanas usually do.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/jun/02/bnp-far-right-local-elections

Above the former lingerie shop, the curtains are half-drawn and patterned with a Wedgwood pottery design. Next door stands the old Spode Works. Once famed for creamware and pearlware, for bone china and blue underglaze, last year the company went into administration after nearly 250 years. Today the paint is peeling around the windows of the old factory shop; peer through the dusty glass and the room sits dark and quiet, its shelves empty.

It's no Spectator.

Is there anywhere on the net I might be able to find Melanie Phillips' oldskool 'liberal' Guardian writing? I don't think I've ever seen any of it.

Answering the initial thread question eight years too late, my suspicion is that there has always been a lot of bad writing in the Guardian and we are just in more of a position to notice it now.

Oh, dear. If you are going to puff this book at least mention some of the devastating responses from other scientists. That would be the intellectually rigourous thing for a lay person to do.

Well done that man.

There is simply nothing left of it when he has finished – and he does so from the perspective of real science which the theory has so shockingly betrayed.

Oh really? Melanie Philips not an expert on science shocker.

Or what Matt said.

Telegraph no better:

First cut a strand of hair from your head. Next, fill in a questionnaire about your state of health and send it, with your hair, to an address on the other side of the country.

Then sit back and, while not exactly by return of post, you will in due course receive relief from whatever ailment is troubling you. It could come in the form of a pill or a potion, but it's just as likely to come in the form of healing vibrations, transmitted from the person to whom you've sent your hair.

What is it? Magic? Witchcraft? A load of twaddle? No, it's radionics, the largely unexplained art of healing someone you've never met, who is hundreds, even thousands of miles away.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/wellbeing/5356013/Radionics-can-a-lock-of-hair-hold-the-key-to-health.html

o_0

It must be great not to believe in climate change. The worst thing that's ever happened to the planet Earth, the problem of such a scale that it dwarfs all others and requires us to change our whole way of life (not that we are capable of doing so, hence certain catastrophe of one level or another) -- this problem just doesn't exist.

Maybe that's why MP has so much anger to expend on other, lesser things.

It helps her to sleep peacefully at night, her mind entirely at rest <---- LOL

ummmm... pretty sure she believes in climate change.

But it wasn't us wot dun it

Amusing to note that one of the sources cited approvingly in that book (which is a waterfall of bullshit, obv) is MP herself.

go go reader mailbag —

In France, only cases where investigation by the presiding magistrate reveals significant evidence that points to a high probability of prosecution will be put forward to the court. Hence the 25% conviction rate. The great majority of cases go no further than the investigative phase.

Writing as someone who was falsely accused of rape in the UK by a disturbed and evil scorned woman that I'd known for five years and never even kissed or touched, I can only applaud French scepticism.

Let's have another article, pointing out that hard evidence is required for a rape conviction: certainty, not probability, nor likelihood, nor possibility. Perhaps that is the real message that women (and men) need to carry with them into situations where they find themselves alone in private with potentially predatory males.
Chris H, via email

Worth noting that Andrew Sparrow and Martin Kettle, doing the website's live-updating news and analysis pages on the results and the reshuffle, have been actually rather good: the latter certainly better than the paper's recent standard of comment on party politics

iirc, melanie phillips wrote most of her 'liberal' pieces for the observer rather than the guardian (well before both papers shared the same owner)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/jun/09/battle-orgreave-miners-strike

C'mon Pinefox you really should let people have the joy of the first line without having to click through...

Dark and damp and deep, the earth gives up its secrets: scraps of metal, furls of plastic, rubble and pebbles and clay. Among them lie shards of coal, brittle and black and glistening. Rain speckles the soil, the mounds of earth, the stationary diggers. This is all that is left of Orgreave opencast mine.

Ever so slightly out of her depth there

alternately, not buried deep enough

iirc, melanie phillips wrote most of her 'liberal' pieces for the observer rather than the guardian (well before both papers shared the same owner)

― Ward Fowler, Friday, 5 June 2009 19:00 (4 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

just seen this but nope - she was social affairs correspondent for the guardian, then a columnist, then jumped ship to the obs. a quick lexisnexis search suggests she was heading in a rightward direction at the observer: stuff about "saving the family" etc - think that was why she left the guardian?

can't link to them but i could c&p some examples if people don't mind a bit of tl;dr.

lol l-bart and david peace should do a write-off on the miners' strike. sixth-form purle prose vs overdone 'pared-down' ish

well he's done gb84 which is fine when he sticks to the actual miners' story and less fine when he decides to turn the book into tales from the crypt. maybe l-bart should write a book about jarvis cocker sitting in the greasy spoon reading slim obscure volumes of belgian poetry while being taunted by striking miners.

maybe l-bart should write a book about jarvis cocker sitting in the greasy spoon reading slim obscure volumes of belgian poetry while being taunted by striking miners

I think Lionel could give it a go but I don't see it replacing Oliver! in the nation's hearts

Hmm...Tommy Steele stars in The Jarvis Cocker Story!

You've Maeterlinck A Pocket Or Two

"Half a sixpence/ we signed to Fire Records for half a sixpence"

Blur could cover "Food, Glorious Food!"

Clever wording.

The one Broadway soundtrack where you wouldn't want the Original Cast Recording.

"Whe-eh-eh-ere is Blur?/ Whe-eh-eh-ere is Blur?"

Perhaps there could be song performed by Ocean Custos Scene?

Tanya Gold's spoon hell:

Wedding lists were designed to help a young married couple build a home, in the days when everyone got married aged 12 and a half, and were totally spoonless. But today, you are not buying your friends a new life. They are 30 years old and rotting. They have wrinkles and Botox and they sag, like dying balloons. You are buying them an upgrade.

saw that: disgusting woman