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

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

although to pinefox i think as soon as a profession starts becoming professionalised through academic qualifications etc then in discussing this one is always implicitly talking about class already

the LM types were very smart very early in recognising that e.g. general media outlets were going to need more and more handy go-to commentators and suiting-and-booting themselves as reliably friendly-seeming media-savvy faces in sectors of rising interest like (as an actual-real e.g.) the moral issues of technologised fertility, where "reliable" basically means turning up looking young not being a stammering nerd (it's called "content" bcz at root it's abt filling space, on a page or in time)

also in print-media LM set up (pre-spiked) shop as advisers on going digital for various big titles (e.g. the guardian): i got my own first training in digital procedure from a couple of LM-ers and their approach to work-flow with electronic documents was excellent! they were weirdos but they weren't awful to work with, you just had to switch off when they started ranting abt bosnia

in general the issue of authority within contested areas of knowledge isn't (obvious point klaxon) at all new -- but knowledge is big and getting bigger, fiefdoms of authority are splintering and thus multiplying, and grifters able to present themselves as just what an anxious harassed time-poor editor needs RIGHT NOW are very ably working this pitch all the time

(mainly what i was saying re "class" and "handwaving" -- beyond mildly teasing everyone in an unhelpful way -- is that these are very tricky and urgent issues which can't be solved via sweeping generalisations: quite the opposite, since i think the kinds of ppl who become grifters get very good at exploiting our established emotive shortcuts for navigating such territories as they mutate and as anxiety mounts)

in general the issue of authority within contested areas of knowledge isn't (obvious point klaxon) at all new -- but knowledge is big and getting bigger, fiefdoms of authority are splintering and thus multiplying, and grifters able to present themselves as just what an anxious harassed time-poor editor needs RIGHT NOW are very ably working this pitch all the time

I think this is maybe fair but again my point is that standards of understanding basic causality seem to be through the floor (cf the incorrect use of focus groups by labour) and this seems to be something across the board not just in journalism but journalism is maybe the place that disseminates this most widely. harris is the ideal example because of how he presented his vox pops in ways that implied that they reflected 'general feelings' in his chosen locale for the week. They were rolled out again and again in ways that offered no methodological rationale but repeatedly suggested claims that couldn't be supported by this kind of approach. it was frustrating for many reasons, the first being that this could have been informative and interesting as a project if someone with a more judicious sense of the explanatory potential of vox pops/ sampling etc had been in charge but maybe even moreso because of how he himself managed to be convinced by this nonsense in a way that allowed him to both demonstrate his own narrow little obsessions and absolve himself of them in one go.

My sense is that the snake-oil market is overheated yes but that what is not necessarily needed is more complex and specific expertise but just a basic grasp of causality and willingness to be self-critical. I suspect that partic at a publication like the guardian the real answer is as has been suggested by the others that once monetised clicks is the model, the value of accuracy is diminished in proportion to outrage/novelty etc. Harris bits did lots of things that suited the guardian editors fine, piss boiling foremost.

and yes overheated absolutely saturated news cycles with gears turning turning turning, horrible to think about. it makes me anxious

Britain has agreed a new trade deal with Norway, Iceland and Lichtenstein that will soften some of the new trade barriers created by Brexit.

Under the agreement announced by trade secretary Liz Truss, new tariffs on some cheeses and fish would be reduced to lower levels or eliminated.

🧀🧀🧀🧀Liz finally delivers in a very on-brand fashion, she's softened some cheese barriers. 🧀🧀🧀🧀🧀

This is quite thoughtful.

How Edward Colston's statue will be displayed in Bristolhttps://t.co/iDBqjhXpyx pic.twitter.com/Z8dbbngUEk

— Bristol Live (@BristolLive) June 3, 2021

People are disengaged is it

https://amp.theguardian.com/global/2021/jun/05/kim-leadbeater-on-running-for-her-sister-jo-coxs-seat-i-know-this-is-what-she-would-want-me-to-be-doing?

Astonishingly, Leadbeater, who has always shied away from the limelight..

hmmm

when she tried to suggest "the hard left" are like the yin to Mair's yang, not in this particular interview but on Look North it just sounded as horribly dumb as what any typical Labour Right MP would say. I think she does overplay the outsider/political ingenue card way too much.

Brendan Bracken, who founded the modern Financial Times (whose London HQ is Bracken House) set up a summer school at the age of 54 and pretended to be a disobedient 16yr old boy with a premature aging condition, to satisfy his fetish for being caned https://t.co/YF6Ccl2Fsd

— Mike Bird (@Birdyword) June 6, 2021

not kink shaming here, just laughing at the lengths this lad went to get his bottom smacked and the English public school system lol.

oh it seems he went to a Christian Brothers school in Ireland at one point, well that explains a lot.

from skimming his wiki it seems during the Irish War of Independence he tried to pass himself off as an Aussie and was very shady and secretive about his Irish Republican roots en-route to his peerage and becoming a British establishment figure. A shrink would have had some fun with this lad.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E3MEtdyWEAEgMML?format=jpg&name=large
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E3MEtS3XEAAuGgV?format=jpg&name=large

two Asian candidates blocked from the shortlist in Batley and Spen and the Muslim community already hates Kieth for his cowardly, mealy mouthed response to recent bombing of Palestinian civilians. If you've got a spare grand, buy some money by wacking it all on the Tory candidate.

just looking at the latest odds, 2/5 Cons + Labour have drifted out to 2/1 now.

so now a week after Dom attempts some real opposition and Kieth contrives a prime time tearful confession on the Moran Show designed to humanise him with some messy details of an impromptu doggy bbq - ppl still prefer real Tories to this blubbering phoney with suuuch an embarrassing middle name lol. Never even watched it tbh!

Westminster voting intention:

CON: 44% (+4)
LAB: 35% (-2)
GRN: 7% (+2)
LDEM: 6% (-2)

via @IpsosMORI, 28 May - 03 Jun
Chgs. w/ 22 Apr

— Britain Elects (@BritainElects) June 7, 2021

CONs: 44%
Liberal Alliance: 48%

— Stephen (@StephenofLondon) June 7, 2021

lol