"we'll change the things that need changing and that's all we'll change": the paSUKification of post-brexit politics 2021

I think the only way Corbyn + McD could have won over the selfish old cunts would be to promise more foodbanks, massive benefit cuts and triple lock on state pensions until every last young person is dead!

Ignoring all the other laughable stuff about that Harris tweet, I suspect what he actually means by "generalising about" is "reading and interpreting statistics", as it's all based on the Ben Walker New Statesman piece. From what I've seen, people have generally been making interesting comments based on material and demographic analysis, which indirectly I supposed discredits Harris' whole oeuvre.

― glumdalclitch, Thursday, 3 June 2021 21:19 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

yeah i mean harris is horrible and but he is especially susceptible to believing his own ventriloquistic vox pops because: a) he is incredibly stupid and doesn't understand the basic premise of how qualitative work can be used as evidence and b) he clearly has a very fraught and self-loathing/self-satisfied relationship to 'class.'

I've seen people having discussions about how the left could win over this demographic, like radical state funded social care reforms that isn't an inheritance tax on wealth etc. If you were dealing with rational people it might work but the Tories could be bold enough to get away with fudging some diluted version again. And if these bastards get an inkling that young people might be getting policy offers as good as they had it, then that's what they will always vote against.

xp

I can't get over that image of Harris at Select, taking on the persona of a Mancunian lout because of the hypnotic power of Oasis.

i have been wondering a bit lately about what journalists are taught as there seems to be a fairly endemic problem of understanding how to interpret information. anything that reports the findings from 'a study' in the guardian for instance seems invariably to misinterpret the findings and translate them into something that the study couldn't possibly claim based on its data/method (and upon inspection, the studies almost never do make the claims theguardian makes for them). This seems to be particularly uh *problematic* in the area of news reporting and my guess is that its rooted in absolute disregard for critical thinking. My guess is that this stuff is taught in journalism classes but that its shaken out of you as soon as you arrive for your internship by some 'forget what they taught you!' asshole and the endpoint is harris or cadwalladr.

This assumes they’ve taken journalism classes. Harris, for example, did PPE at Oxford. Cadwalladr also went to Oxford but idk whether she has formal journalistic qualifications subsequent to that.

Westminster voting intention:

CON: 46% (+3)
LAB: 30% (+1)
GRN: 9% (+1)
LDEM: 6% (-2)
REFUK: 2% (-1)

via @YouGov, 02 - 03 Jun
Chgs. w/ 28 Mayhttps://t.co/qQE6NGf5D9

— Britain Elects (@BritainElects) June 4, 2021

https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/images/ic/1200x675/p02c7hw2.jpg

who are Harris's journalistic role models? probably complete dickheads like Parsons and Nick Kent.

It’s notable that law journalists, for example, tend to be much, much better than other fields and old guess that’s partly because you effectively need a formal qualification. In the subject you’re covering. A lot of the general journalism The Guardian publishes on education, science, etc, seems to be ‘talk to three people and synthesise a line from what they’ve just told you’.

*i’d guess*

Yeah I did journalism back in Portugal and scientific journalism was consistently the worst because no one who'd studied journalism had any background in it.

This only got worse as papers cottoned on to "study shows people who have milk in their coffee more likely to get laid" type items being guaranteed lots of shares on social media.

there was never going to be a transition from fake Mancunian wide-boy to decent thoughtful + principled journalist because he's too much of a narcissist to just knuckle down and do some serious journalism. Everything has to be centred around him.

And he’s only, at worst, the fifth or sixth most objectionable former music journalist turned current affairs commentator! They are a scourge.

Yes, that's a very good point ShariVari. An uncanny number of these people. It hasn't especially happened with, say, film journalists, has it?

This is the kind of topic where someone says it should be a poll, isn't it?

Harris. Sawyer. Barbara Ellen. Moran. More?

Burchill and Parsons, I suppose, but I no longer even think of them as music journalists.

Paphides says bad things, maybe not on current affairs. Petridis I think just does fashion.

Parsons, Burchill, Barlow, Lynsky....

I forgot Lynskey - an awful case.

Who is Barlow? Ken?

I was thinking this has the makings of a classic "who is the worst" poll

lol, Eve Barlow is the former NME deputy editor now making a name for herself, via Fox News and others, as an expert on antisemitism - calling pro-Palestinian online activity a ‘digital pogrom’, etc.

What has Sawyer done?

Wonder if any of these are still lurking here.

lol I didn't even know she was former NME, but no doubt long after my time.

even one of the more benign horrors like Maconie have managed to boil my piss a lot in recent years!

Talking of journos.

I would just urge everyone to have a think about what the American intelligence sector is and what it does, and how well it does it - often very badly, as in the last few years - and have a think about how hard we want to endorse this one. pic.twitter.com/E4INYqyWgo

— Flying_Rodent (@flying_rodent) June 4, 2021

is OJ happy to disseminate any old bullshit as long as it has been "fact-checked" by the BBC these days?

Dunno what you're on about xyzz, think there's a pretty wide consensus the americans created covid in a lab.

xpost

'these days?'

White blonde Tory woman goes BNP in this one. Another excellent day all round.

i mean, the first tweet is basically just "foreigners bring disease" isn't it?

— michael (@Sisyphusa) June 4, 2021

she's done it again!

The Eve Barlow lunatic was at the NME?

Christ, she makes Harris look good and Moran look tolerable!

Calzino: Maconie wrote in the New Statesman attacking and mocking JC, in about 2016.

I think he is actually (online?) friends of some kind with Jess Phillips MP.

Maconie also likes to do the Northern safari thing, but he sees himself as more of a working class expert than Harris and uses The Kaiser Chiefs as a prime example of northern working-class culture!

"they are a scourge"

dudes just @ me

tempted to throw a mild counter-strop at all the wild vague unsupported handwavy harris-esque claims being made here abt class and how professional journalism is taught tbh: "i think you'll find critical thinking is only available to graduate students" lol really?

my own assumption (semi-backed by some experience, selectively filtered to suit *my* priors), is that
(a) the layer of hacks who started on the morecambe argus did in fact learn a fvckton of good old shoe-leather practice via glueboy-apprenticeships under gizzled old "forget what they taught you!" editor-assholes, much of which was wiped out by the new generations of journalist who marched straight into senior editorships and publishing positions from university media-courses (and also marketing courses)

the practical element here is something 've banged on abt before -- the editing fact-cehcking and re-write structure shd include ppl as deft with statistics (and their misuse) as it does ppl deft with spelling and grammar, who throw the article back at the writer full of red pen and queries whenever the writer is processing that dimension of knowledge badly

(a news feature at nature magainze e.g. will be processed for a sub-editor for spelling grammar and readability but also by a scientific proofing editor for "good science" -- the subs there also need to clear a p high bar of basic scientific knowledge, as i know to my embarassment when i applied and didn't lol lol lol)

(b) no idea what b was going to be, possibly the "wiped out" bit of the post as is, possibly some other important amazing insightful observation

actually (b) was probably something like this:

that the significant expansion of secondary and tertiary education and qualfication-based professional career paths 70s-90s combined the shifts in publishing marketing and targeting 80s-00s to screw up a whole bunch of tacit-knowledge practice and collective contestation-based factual processing in all kinds of journalism, replacing them with compromised theory-based simulacra of themselves, where the niche-as-goal functions as unacknowledged habits that sidestep and shut out fruitful conflict

guess why editors rarely call me

even in the biz I used to be in you'd get old-fashioned bosses who truly believed in the apprenticeship system and valued experience and time-served candidates for promotion. And then you'd get the bosses who liked over-promoting insidious little brown-nosers and flash little bastards that didn't know there arse from their elbows and then wonder why big projects used to end up costing them a fortune in overrun penalties.

benefits of computers: we can all shout at each other on ilx
drawbacks: destruction of publishing as any kind of a route out of bondage

Martin Kettle is "time-served" so maybe he is a very very wise old and very capable journalist who is forced to write like a complete fucking tool because he still has The Game in him!

This is what happens when a political party is dominated by appalling, vision-less managerial bigots with nothing but contempt for members, voters and democracy. pic.twitter.com/HPhJ3CzPDD

— Simon Vessey (@Simon_Vessey) June 4, 2021

So, UK puts Portugal on the travel green list, hordes of tourists swoop upon Oporto for the footie, footie ends, UK removes Portugal from the green list.

You'll be surprised to hear the general reaction has been that this might not be entirely science based.

actually (b) was probably something like this:

that the significant expansion of secondary and tertiary education and qualfication-based professional career paths 70s-90s combined the shifts in publishing marketing and targeting 80s-00s to screw up a whole bunch of tacit-knowledge practice and collective contestation-based factual processing in all kinds of journalism, replacing them with compromised theory-based simulacra of themselves, where the niche-as-goal functions as unacknowledged habits that sidestep and shut out fruitful conflict

― mark s, Friday, 4 June 2021 bookmarkflaglink

Please pitch this for your next Guardian piece

i will forward it without changing a word

I don't entirely understand Mark S's polemic as he says people had been saying things about class, but I can't see that they were.

I wasn't saying anything anyway, fortunately.

"good old shoe-leather practice via glueboy-apprenticeships"

this is all career progressions should be, sweeping up rubble for 3 years and then you get a shiny new wheel-barrow if you've behaved yourself!

thats right 🛒

(a) the layer of hacks who started on the morecambe argus did in fact learn a fvckton of good old shoe-leather practice via glueboy-apprenticeships under gizzled old "forget what they taught you!" editor-assholes, much of which was wiped out by the new generations of journalist who marched straight into senior editorships and publishing positions from university media-courses (and also marketing courses)

― mark s, Friday, 4 June 2021 11:47 (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

haha sorry, i don't doubt that journalists whose formation predates the need for a formal qualification learned how to critically examine data and knowledge and there is yeah basically journalistic standards were forged under exactly those conditions and merely formalised into academic standards post-hoc. While i realise that i'm probably guilty of the classic on the internet sin of inventing a guy and then getting mad at him, the 'forget what you learned' asshole i was envisaging was not the grizzled old news desk editor from a howard hawks film but some asshole with the same journalism qualification as the graduate he's condescending to. I'm possibly way off and newsrooms differ from lots of other workplaces i've found myself in but its my experience that applied practices absolutely necessitate critical forms of thinking but this is often repudiated by academically-formed know it alls (ahem) with a narrow and ill-formed boner for 'authenticity' (and i would argue that harris's whole schtick in some ways mirrors this whole operation)

(a news feature at nature magainze e.g. will be processed for a sub-editor for spelling grammar and readability but also by a scientific proofing editor for "good science" -- the subs there also need to clear a p high bar of basic scientific knowledge, as i know to my embarassment when i applied and didn't lol lol lol)

― mark s, Friday, 4 June 2021 11:47 (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

i guess this works some places and some places it doesn't? like isn't it known that the bbc outsource all of this to something vaguely LM-affiliated. my ~vague~ sense is it also has to do with the larger 'consultancy' eco-system that exists around charities/government linking research and PR practices and collapsing the bar for exactly the kind of evidential fluency that i started off complaining about

sorry not 'all of this' but the interpretation of scientific evidence, not sub-editing etc

actually (b) was probably something like this:

that the significant expansion of secondary and tertiary education and qualfication-based professional career paths 70s-90s combined the shifts in publishing marketing and targeting 80s-00s to screw up a whole bunch of tacit-knowledge practice and collective contestation-based factual processing in all kinds of journalism, replacing them with compromised theory-based simulacra of themselves, where the niche-as-goal functions as unacknowledged habits that sidestep and shut out fruitful conflict

― mark s, Friday, 4 June 2021 11:57 (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah basically i meant a less nuanced version of this