Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

They’re just fucking with us now

Strange as it may seem, Keir Starmer could be the British Bernie Sanders | Patrick Maguire https://t.co/8e70kkiUkq

— The Guardian (@guardian) February 27, 2020

Cultivating new support across class and ethnic divides has put Sanders on the road to the Democratic nomination, and Starmer believes that the same approach can put Labour back on the path to power: keep left, rebuild a diverse coalition of voters, and look beyond the red wall.

no i think a lot of them really are capable of this level of doublethink

Patrick Maguire is a political correspondent at the New Statesman

the vested interests arraigned behind RLB

well yes the left of the party's base and the Unite union are obstacles to be overcome, never mind that Starmer still hasn't revealed whose pocket he is in the shady cunt.

isn't party politics about self-interest groups or is it somehow shady and "populist" if the self-interest groups aren't corporations and billionaires?

This is how these cunts talk when they've got no concept of a Labour Party that can anything else but a reconstructed version of the tories.

They’re just fucking with us now

🐦[Strange as it may seem, Keir Starmer could be the British Bernie Sanders | Patrick Maguire https://t.co/8e70kkiUkq🕸
— The Guardian (@guardian) February 27, 2020🕸]🐦

_Cultivating new support across class and ethnic divides has put Sanders on the road to the Democratic nomination, and Starmer believes that the same approach can put Labour back on the path to power: keep left, rebuild a diverse coalition of voters, and look beyond the red wall._

RLB doesn't have an attack line. She hasn't attacked anyone in this campaign. Rightly or wrongly.

Apparently wrongly.

releasing her list of campaign donors and then her biggest donor big len steaming into the starmer campaign about his lack of disclosure was a minor attack I suppose. If I had been running her campaign Starmer would probably be successfully suing me for libel right now, but I'd have made at least some of that shit stick to him and cause some damage at least. I hate all that unity bs, as if politics isn't about competing factions and their interests.

even though Starmer has put on a show of keeping it polite blah blah unity, his campaign have been playing dirty and smearing right from from the off. Bunch of foul Akehurst/Labour First moles!

Politeness is always a political move

RLB doesn't have an attack line. She hasn't attacked anyone in this campaign. Rightly or wrongly.

sorry, as calz said.

Big Dunty has gushed that Starmer is "the functional opposition coming" because his twitter account has done a short critical thread on the outrage against oh so brave Sir Philip Rutnam and the civil service. What a merciless offensive against the tory government, they must be shaking in their boots in the face of finally ... a functional opposition!

Can't wait till Lisa Nandy comes out and says that Labour haven't been bullying civil servants enough and how bullying is a part of life in towns

— Loki (@Lokinash06) February 29, 2020

oops sorry I'm misusing this thread as a proxy Labour leadership one

or poxy as I should have said!

posting vmic

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/28/press-tom-watson-peerage-labour-lords-rupert-murdoch

Just had a lovely train of thought where this thread is the valid title for a dystopian 70s sci-fi world

Watson’s name features a number of times in this week’s report of the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse (IICSA) but he is not, so far as I can tell, directly criticised. The report is more concerned that, though there was ample evidence of sexual abusers linked to Westminster, there was a culture of deference towards politicians and other well-connected people. Others feature rather more centrally than Watson.

Yeah

Other thoughts later, but mostly "satanic abuse"

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/02/pete-buttigieg-president-white-house-gay-lgbtq

I’m sure there is a good article that could be written about Pete Buttigieg running a moderately successful campaign as a gay man, but this is not it.

Guardian really covering itself in glory atm. This piece is so scummy I archived it. Chucking in the Polanski comparison - as though being uninvited from speaking was on the same fucking planet as being a child rapist who never served his sentence. What’s the motive for such a wild and insane comparison, I wonder?*

Hate crimes against trans people are spiralling and let’s not forget New Zealand granted a woman’s asylum application because of this reason. But nah, Suzanne and her mates doing the dirty work of the far right and kicking and screaming about being challenged for their bigoted views are the real victims.

*this is rhetorical, it’s just too libellous to write down in full

Sorry, as protesting a child rapist who never served his sentence.

"Woman’s Place UK clearly isn’t a hate group, and the Labour pledge led to many women using the hashtag #ExpelMe on Twitter"

expel them then, that would be guaranteed to cost Starmer some votes.

fuck Suzanne Moore and her hair that looks like an elephant has shat on her head.

I've no idea who she is or what she sounds like but its hard to imagine that she has a worse speaking voice than than Paperclip Man

she's a bigot and once tried to run as an independent against Diane Abbott and lost her deposit I think.

I imagine Diane Abbott was quaking in her boots when she saw Suzanne Moore's name on the candidate list.

Woman’s Place UK was founded in 2017 to do not much else than moan about trans women and it is totally a hate group. Someone I have known for 30 years is a member and last week, somehow a phone call to offer sympathy re: my dead cousin turned into me telling her repeatedly not to talk to me about WPUK or Janice Turner or puberty blockers or how she isn’t in a hate group (nobody who is not in a hate group needs to go around telling people they are not in a hate group). Babe, you are in a hate group.

Lol. My t-shirt saying "I am not in a hate group" has people asking a lot of questions already answered etc

Good name for a band that, Hate Group.

stopped reading that long read on the Golden Dawn trials by Trilling because it pissed me off when he jumps from Nazi occupied Greece to the creation of the EU without mentioning the UK backed fascist tyranny they suffered in between which has to be relevant to their history of fascism, typical ahistorical centrist bollocks.

Indeed, one of the common mistakes made about Xenakis is that he had half his face blown off fighting the Nazis when, in fact, he had half his face off fighting the British.

other common mistakes made abt xenakis include wait i have the list here somewhere

I've got one you can borrow.

it mentions it halfway down:

The German occupation of Greece in the second world war was marked by famine, massacres and a growing conflict between communist-led partisans and those rightwing Greeks who collaborated with the occupiers. As the war drew to a close, British forces, who had until then supported the partisans, attempted to prevent them from running the newly liberated country. Instead, the British empowered the right. This sowed the seeds for the civil war of 1946 to 1949, during which more than 150,000 people were killed. As the historian Mark Mazower writes in Inside Hitler’s Greece, the civil war ended in victory for the right, behind whom “lurked the mysterious ‘para-state’, a loose network of shadowy rightwing paramilitary organisations dedicated to protecting Greece … from the left”.

Almost three decades of repression followed [...]

I went into a rage and stopped reading before there!

The idea of Dan Trilling as a centrist is pretty funny tbh.

^^^^^

I'm in a grumpy mood today, everyone at the Guardian looks like a cunt - even Chakrabortty can fuck off!

suzy, as a US trans person, thank you for fighting the good fight for my UK trans sisters and brothers. I follow a *lot* of UK and Ireland based trans people on Twitter and it sickens me what they put up with every day. I just can't conceive of the mental and emotional exhaustion from this level of hatred all the time.

Eliza, I am really not worthy of that praise because I could fight a lot harder. About 15 years ago I needed and used ‘female-only’ space and one of the women sharing it with me was trans. This was no big deal and in my area had been going on for years, and I am glad she had a safe space too. Most of the terfy women in my orbit will never require this kind of help, but their ~pontifications~ on these issues are causing a lot of upset and confusion to less privileged women who do.

My only real "run in" with terfs was when a bunch of eejits showed up at the Hampstead heath men's pond and sky news reporters in beards to say they were self declared men to, you know, draw attention to the lunacy of the gender recognition act. It was so obvious that there was absolutely nothing really at stake here for these women. For a start they were all quite happy to be getting changed alongside *actual men*.

I’ve had to drop a friend because she got well terfy on Facebook - I think she caught it from Mumsnet and then got into a hate group and she kept posting all this absolute shite. It was very easy to hit the unfriend button.

Woman’s Hour has broadcast some insidious stuff too - this week they were talking about the National Women’s Register and I tuned in because my mum was a member back when it was the National Housewives Register. Although they didn’t mention the word ‘trans’, it was all safe-space this and safe-space that and I ended up shouting at the radio.

Yeah, I want to believe that the increase of TERF visibility is just an inevitable consequence of the increase of visibility of trans issues full stop and not a situation where prejudice is actually growing, but it is pretty scary.

It is, but this isn’t exactly an organic campaign either. There’s an awful lot of astroturfing and well-organised and funded campaigning behind this.

She's only an occasional Guardian writer, but I just looked up Helen Lewis online. She's annoyed me for a long time (after I initially thought she was OK!), but I actually think she is getting worse -- becoming more smug, more self-congratulatory, more right-wing, more the kind of person who would retweet, say, David Aaronovitch or Philip Collins, posting things like 'What if Trump was write to kill Soleimani?' and sort of passive-aggressive support of Tony Blair ...

She didn't use to be quite this bad! Is she going to end up as a Telegraph columnist or something?