Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

London is just absolutely full of millionaires

I love the way the photo caption inanely frames the Q&A problem:

Some locations can be more of a financial challenge than others for buying a property. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images

Only the Lib Dems can win here! https://t.co/8F7lBGkJZx pic.twitter.com/T6lp9mMJ33

— Lafargue (@Lafargue) December 6, 2021

lol they are still doing this now? I don't even think the Graun is sure of what they are trying to do here tbh, old habits die hard.

"When she appears on Zoom, she looks pale, composed and serious-minded beneath her eyecatching red hair (was it this that made the police mistake this ordinary 28-year-old woman for a firebrand?)"

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/dec/07/patsy-stevenson-interview-everard-vigil-arrest-faces-of-year

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/dec/09/burying-leni-riefenstahl-nina-gladitz-lifelong-crusade-hitler-film-maker

this an A+ longread which I've only read half of because I'm on the way to the dentist, but I'm going to finish it later. But yeah Riefenstahl was equally as evil + nazi af as she was talented has always been my take. She reckoned Goebbels hated her, but in his dairies he had nothing but effusive praise for her and he slagged every fucker off including Hitler in his dairies.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FGUcR6iXIAIXILR?format=jpg&name=small

she just recycles the scraps from the Succession writers waste basket and these fuckwits are lost for superlatives ... every time!

let's not rule out the positives of Mitch Benn burning his laptop

besides the fact it might blow up and kill him

I would genuinely rather eat a plate of my own shit than ever again hear a Mitch Benn song.

even more so than The Archers or The Moral Maze, any kind of R4 comedy/satirical shows have me reaching for that button at light speed

*boak*

https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2021/dec/11/david-baddiel-and-his-daughter-on-his-social-media-addiction-it-can-reward-and-punish-you

recently saw some old panel show footage of everyone laughing after Sean Lock jokes about Thatcher's corpse getting catapulted into Buckingham Palace, apart from Baddiel grimacing away in the background, clearly sickened that this guy was funnier than him and making jokes about dead Thatch - how dare he be so rude.

and Baddiel used to make jokes about having anal sex with 13 yr old girls wo sent him fan mail and of course there is his famous blackface routine.

his father’s dementia, which he often tweets about, and his late mother’s infidelity, which he made a live show about in 2016

The guy's a prince.

He couldn't get any laughs out of his daughter's anorexia but at least he got a Guardian feature out of it.

How dare a bunch of plebs and people of colour continually call out DB for blacking up after he so magnanimously aPoLoGiSeD ffs?

Fuck him, and fuck her for excusing him.

his joek attempts at remodelling himself as an elder public intellectual tut tutting about people on social media who are beastly towards him is getting him the gigs though.

Idk I don’t like DB at all and HF even less, but I found I understood him a bit better after reading that piece. Didn’t expect it. Huh.

Also on the subject of using dementia and the rest for material, it’s gallows humour, no?

I’ve met him a few times through work, he was my neighbour for a while BITD and he’s always been perfectly behaved in both settings but the guy didn’t apologise until it was demanded of him and seems to resent people for holding him to account. POBRÉCITO!

David Baddiel and humour? I'll believe it when I see it.

I think he's a despicable bullshit merchant + hypocrite and a wanker tbh and he looks a lot like my older brother which makes me hate him even more!

yeah and he's not remotely funny, hence the edgelord stuff

he's done performative* public apology but afaik never apologised directly to jason lee? (not that i would know this obv but lee says not as of 2020 iirc)

*yes this is an incorrect usage i am in a hurry

and I'm sure his bb2 show about "toxic social media" will be a real rare treat

His BBC2 show about David Baddiel you mean?

i started to say he is to public intellectuals what david walliams is to children's literature but it made me think of rory mcgrath so i'm stopping right here

couldn't he just go to a doc or a shrink to deal with ego and butthurt issues? Or maybe just admit that he's a racist prick. And GYAC look up the 90's vid where has Ray Houghton doing a potato potato take the piss out the Irish routine, the guy is fucking cock!

Lol I haven’t changed my view on him, I just feel I get him a bit better. He’s still wrong but I can understand him a lot more than someone awful like Franc3s Barb3r

couldn't he just go to a doc or a shrink to deal with ego and butthurt issues?

He could get a book or a live tour and DVD out of it too. It's win-win!

https://c.tenor.com/Loy4BOAxEMgAAAAd/analyze-this.gif

he's done performative* public apology but afaik never apologised directly to jason lee? (not that i would know this obv but lee says not as of 2020 iirc)

*yes this is an incorrect usage i am in a hurry

ok fair but i still feel that it was handy that the thing it used to mean had a word for it, and now it kinda doesn't

even tho presumably if it does get a new word the same thing will happen again

"“For people who get a thrill from anger, apologies make no difference. There’s a notion now online that shouting itself has a kind of nobility, that it’s the voice of the disenfranchised,” he says. If Baddiel wasn’t on social media, this embarrassment from his past would have been largely forgotten."

He wouldn't have written his books on AS either..

>>> performative, as in an action delivered by words, such as “I do” and “I’m sorry”, is totally vulnerable to the problem that the words may be said without them actually enforcing the action. so that performative has come to mean statements with no intention of action.

This doesn't quite make sense to me.

I see how performative (perhaps unfortunately) comes to mean this new thing, but not how this flows logically from the old thing, which arguably meant the opposite.

https://i.imgur.com/xea6iVR.jpg

Oops sorry for huge image...Have been looking for this for ages: the various options for performative apologies.

I see how performative (perhaps unfortunately) comes to mean this new thing, but not how this flows logically from the old thing, which arguably meant the opposite.

― the pinefox, Monday, 13 December 2021 12:29 (six hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

this is true.

it doesn't flow logically, it flows empirically (ppl fib a lot and correlation in large quantities is more and more taken for causation)

my favoured exemplary performative statement is "i now pronounce thee man and wife" (and i don't think this is vulnerable to the fibbing dynamic)

(tho i do like the idea that the vicar can say the next day "actually you're NOT married bcz i totally didn't mean it!")

but of course the elements go into that making "man and wife" performative are very specific and required by law

I did a few performative confessions with priests when I was a kid. Like make something up ... had an argument with my brother etc... rather than yeah I drank some cider last week and started an embankment fire that got out of hand and required the fire service to put it out.

what's the old definition of performative? actorly or something... sort of the same.

not really: it's a technical term introduced by j.l.austin (i guess in the 50s ?) to fvck with analytical philosophers and the like, who were all abt speech being true or all all the time. it's a type of speech that does something rather (than describes something). hence "i now pronounce thee man and wife" is performative bcz it performs the act of marrying two people

(ie it's abt the effect of the performance not the quality of the performance: yr still married if the vicar stammers or gets half the words wrong or falls over)

s/b who were all abt speech being true or FALSE all the time

whereas now when we say someone saying something is performative we just mean they were doing it for show or merely virtue signalling or otherwise pretending

a boring take is that "perform" has a few different senses and it's fine if the derived adjective "performative" does too

ok fair but i still feel that it was handy that the thing it used to mean had a word for it, and now it kinda doesn't

even tho presumably if it does get a new word the same thing will happen again

― mark s, Sunday, 12 December 2021 18:18 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

also austin definitely invented it with a specific purpose in mind (it's not in the SOED)

https://i.imgur.com/di5raJF.png

well i mean it probably is now, it's not in my grandad's 1933 edn

before 1960 the preferred term was performalicious

I think it's not really true that performative is limited to SAT definitions given how it was so quickly taken up and prodded at by Derrida and subsequently butler so probably its most influential use where I think it's best understood simply as the 'doing' facet of language rather than the describing facet (as we really don't need to get hung up on sorting statements into normal/not normal*)

*What a bunch of totally normal guys