Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

it's what you'd expect and more likely about cronyism and centrist wagon-circling than simple antitrans solidarity. but it's a terrible look for the Graun when so many of its "star" writers consistently behave like this.

but also this

I can't remember this solidarity for Dawn Foster when she got let go for writing an article critical of Tom Watson

— Fred Durst Apologist (@DurstApologist) November 16, 2020

sack them all and hire 👇

I’m sorry for the three trans employees who quit The Guardian in the last eighteen months because of the rhetoric being promoted by the paper. To be made to feel unwelcome at work not because of what you believe but because of who you fundamentally are, that’s the real travesty.

— shon faye. (@shonfaye) November 16, 2020

Is (Fleet Street) journalism the last profession where you can walk out of a job one day and get another job the next? And how does that work when no-one reads newspapers anymore?

Other professions where your talents and cv are no impediment from skipping from job to job are politics, football management and company directorships

Yes, but some football managers have to wait for the next job and some never find the next job, these fuckers are never out of work.

id love a browser extension that filters comment and opinion pieces out. the reporting in the graun is bad enough but its the way the site constantly redirects you to think pieces by people who have never exhibited a capacity to do so that really pushes me over the edge.

"If Keir Starmer sticks to his principles, Labour will vote against a Brexit deal"

The app is very good for creating your own guardian bubble. I never see any opinion and mostly read news, food and Blind Date (I can’t tear myself away from that I’m afraid).

For me, the Guardian is better than it used to be!

yeah actually i’ve thought this for a while and never done anything about it. your post has prompted me to go and remove a load of sections and also add world news categories for countries and continents.

xp I also read Blind Date purely so I can then read the Guyliner writeup.

I have a content blocker on Safari for ads etc and it works very well on those Guardian begging messages.

lol i enjoy the begging messages! i'm like keep begging terfs lol

Blind Date is good, largely due to the Guyliner (xp gyac OTM!)

Crosswords, Letters and Country Diary here.

I stopped buying the graun about a decade ago, but if I had a portable device with a kakuro app on it back then I'd have fucked them off much sooner.

xp - I often just go straight to the Guyliner.

I was going to complain about "Harry Styles wore a dress on the cover of Vogue – and US rightwingers lost it" inanity, but then they've slightly redeemed themselves by covering a very valuable topic (to me as a downstairs resident)
"Quiet please! How to exercise in an upstairs flat – without annoying your neighbours"

ilx faves weigh in:

The demonisation of @suzanne_moore by 300 fellow @guardian journalists causing her to leave her job is disturbing. Identity politics is the curse of the modern left. Gifting the right with each 'woke' witch hunt. Difference of opinion is crucial for adult 'political' discourse.

— Primal Scream (@ScreamOfficial) November 17, 2020

can't believe Bobby's politics are stuck in an imaginary 1980s

just needed "snowflakes" for a bingo

also i'm pretty sure the 300+ employees who complained about Moore's work making them feel harassed and unwelcome weren't mostly journalists but y'know, drugs

Methinks Bobby and his band have a few skeletons waiting to come out of their collective cupboard.

Boab's a bit like trevor phillips in a way - a right-wing reactionary blue labour bigot who thinks because they went through a radical lefty spell in the 80's it excuses all sorts of reactionary tory bullshit attitudes they have. And he's probably getting the same fear Nick Cave was getting a few months back, because he probably knows he's done enough to get me-tooed or even put on the sex-offenders register!

https://guardian.gyford.com/ is handy if you just want to read today’s paper. The opinion section is in there but it’s all siloed off in one section.

siloed is le mot juste

xp excellent link thank u

far less hideous to look at as well

*Such* an great piece. Superb in so many ways. Not the main point, perhaps, but I don't think anyone can drop an immaculately crafted gag (and there are several) into otherwise serious journalism quite like @helenlewis https://t.co/d9K2ty12zg

— Tom Peck (@tompeck) November 16, 2020

HL retweets high praise of her article about why women should be allowed more access to aristocratic titles.

It has taken me a while to come to understand what a terrible person HL really is.

oh god that article which i didn't read tbf despite HL saying she thoroughly addresses any concerns you might have within it, but the whole premise of that article at least, is one of the biggest pisstakes I've ever seen!

I thought it was a very interesting article, describing a curious and bizarre world that I’ve not previously had sight of. I somehow missed the well-crafted gags though.

alright Helen, I knew you were lurking here somewhere!

You’ll notice HLew didn’t miss a chance to crowbar her pet subject in there.

always good to mix a bit terfery with class-baiting I presume?

anyways I can't understand anyone who wouldn't want HL fired from a trebuchet into oblivion, everything about her is rank. Although at least she has fucked off to the US for now, just need to get that passport revoked and they can fucking keep her!

"I can't understand anyone who wouldn't want HL fired from a trebuchet into oblivion"

That makes me laugh out loud! :D

There isn't any TERFery that I could see, she just mentions that the GRA has a clause in that says inheriting a title is the an area with a specific exception - you can't change your position in line by changing your gender.

Look Andrew, as much as I love you doing your usual thing to jump into a thread to defend a woman no matter what a bad person she is, you’re still wrong here: she actually can’t resist going wELl YoU cAnT iNhErIt PrOpErTy BuT yOu CaN bE nOnBiNaRy because of course she does.

idg what is so singularly alluring abt helen lewis 2 u?

lol.

also, helen lewis is just fucking awful.

If lockdown has tipped you into problem drinking, you're probably not alone

it's definitely statistically unlikely that only one person reading this has started problem drinking, and that person is you.

I'm not aware I'm defending her, I'm just pointing out that there's nothing TERFy there - but there doesn't have to be, if we just meditate on her badness long enough.

You did it again! Should start keeping a log.

Can you explain to me, then, why she manages to shoehorn in a bizarre, unnecessary, out of context reference to nonbinary people, in the midst of an article that otherwise has absolutely nothing to do with nonbinary people at all? Can you provide any context or meaning for that bizarre insertion, other than to make the recognition of nonbinary gender look strange, unnecessary or otherwise opposed to the putative rights of the cis women in the piece?

I mean, I cannot believe I had to read this PoS article to affirm that yes, it is weirdly obsessed with the existence of nonbinary people.

I agree, there is nothing *radical* about this article at all, in fact I’m struggling to see her portray it as even remotely feminist. But trans exclusionary? Yes, she definite drops a reference to nonbinary people in there for no other reason than to ride her hobbyhorse about how our rights and existence are... a weird joke to her?

The context seemed to me to be that the article talks about gender and 'modern times' - the passage starts It reveals a country trapped between tradition and modernity, between the Middle Ages and the 21st century.

If you're talking about signifiers of modern attitudes to gender, trans rights and non-binary rights seem like a fairly obvious hook?

with the context that helen lewis is thoroughly opposed to trans rights and one of the most prominent british transphobes, that section happens to come across a little differently! without that context i'd think wondering 'how many lords are nonbinary' etc. would just be a strange aside and i wouldn't think that much of it but considering she's an obsessive transphobe who no doubt considers the concept of nonbinary genders ridiculous, everyone else's reaction of "ffs helen you can't even write a stupid article about how the aristocracy needs to be less sexist in its rules without mentioning your pet issue" is very reasonable

A recently unearthed Suzanne Moore classic:

https://twitter.com/myblacklife23/status
/1329228698113990657?s=19

Goodbye England's rose or whatever I guess

My friend just reminded me of this absolute stinker from S**anne M**re pic.twitter.com/DuJbf2kbSI

— Madame Guillotine (@myblacklife23) November 19, 2020

Goes nicely with this column.

Get on a bus and you will hear many a robust exchange about "ethnicity" which polite and political conversation is afraid of.

I got the bus to go to work every day before the pandemic but somehow never heard this chat.

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