Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

oh god yeah i really hate that guy.

my blood pressure rises as soon as he comes on.

Just noticed that the technology section has a new correspondent whose name is Mercedes Bunz.

the day after the edition with the technology section, too

topman feature in today's guardian felt like a paid advertisement. bad.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/sep/04/liz-jones-exmoor-files-dulverton

It's funny how this keeps going on about how her writing in the MoS, when the first I heard of her was when the Guardian Weekend magazine printed 41 columns of her fucking boring wedding preparations, which isn't mentioned in here.

Why on earth would anyone upload adverts to youtube? Good grief.

I like that people do, it enabled me to prove there was an 80s drink called Bezique and win a crucial pub argument.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxTs0Xw-S_Q

is the guardian slightly retweaked g2 worse any worse than it used to be?

This is one of the poorest, most phoned-in front section articles I've read in some time:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/sep/08/obama-healthcare-speech

The next weeks are also crucial on the Afghanistan front, as Obama ponders how many more troops to send. Here again he'll have a fight with his party's liberals, who don't seem to have given much thought to what would happen there if we reduce troop levels and the Taliban regain control of much of the country - or the country.

Much of the country - or the country - well, actually a majority of Americans polled say that the United States shouldn't be in Afghanistan at all. That is a somewhat more substantial constituency than "his party's liberals". Which makes Tomasky's amazing condescension that much more rich and velvety.

tracer "'yes we can' needs to become 'yes we are'" get on message here

tomasky really is kind of an annoying twat

"'yes we can' needs to become 'yes we are'"

What does he intend that to even mean?? I puzzled over it for a good 4-5 seconds before flipping over to the five-page spread about short men in positions of power.

Did anyone see the bit in G2 yesterday that recommended £275 bunny ear headbands as a fashion tip?

I usually like Tomasky but that was totally all over the place. Amazed/amused at the trollage from US wingnuts.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/09/second-world-war-soviet-pact

oh hey look, a senior member of the guardian editorial team is a fucking stalinist.

Fed by the revival of the nationalist right in eastern Europe...

hmm, pretty sure the last time a nationalist movement appeared in eastern Europe and committed actual genocide this guy was at the forefront of its apologists but maybe my memory is faulty,

he state that had led the campaign against fascism since before the Spanish civil war.

and what a great job those russian anti-fascists did in spain! totally fascist-free for decades and all thanks to uncle joe stalin!

it's a close thing, but i think the seamus milnes are more corrosive to the guardian than the tanya golds in the long run.

Seumas Milne is handy for pinpointing Enrique's latest username.

some fucknut on my facebook posted this article approvingly and some other fucknut commented thus:

"I will repost this article on my wall - since settliing in Poland, I am constantly amazed how history is re-written - and worse, taught! - according to the rampant anti-Russian sentiment here.
21 minutes ago"

i just cannot for the life of me wonder why there might be anti-russian sentiment in poland.

lol wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Russian_sentiment#Poland

Mercedes Bunz is on a roll:

"The 17 declarations got picked up worldwide and discussed worldwide."

"However, The New York Times announcing a startup named Journalism Online LLC, which AFP reported said had attracted "over 500 publications sign up" to a paid-content system."

The fact that there are good reasons for anti-Russian feeling in Eastern Europe doesn't mean there's no distortion of history going on there.

But you know, maybe I'm just a 'Stalinist'.

well, seamus milne describes the annexation of half of poland in 1939 as a "defensive move". he is a stalinist who repeatedly downplays, or in his terms 'relativizes', soviet brutality.

it's a distortion of history to call nazism and soviet communism "the same thing", and there are no doubt bad people in eastern europe who are distorting history.

that's no excuse for the guardian to do the same.

But the pretence that Soviet repression reached anything like the scale or depths of Nazi savagery – or that the postwar "enslavement" of eastern Europe can be equated with wartime Nazi genocide – is a mendacity that tips towards Holocaust denial. It is certainly not a mistake that could have been made by the Auschwitz survivors liberated by the Red Army in 1945.

well, it's true that the postwar enslavement of eastern europe – why the quote marks?! – wasn't as bad as the holocaust. a great starting point. but i would say soviet "repression" did on occasion get as bad, depths-wise, as "nazi savagery".

it is awesome that he brings up the soviet advance through eastern europe in 1945 there though. the civilian population of poland and germany really felt the tide of freedom wash over them.

oh yeah also: russian "campaign against fascism" before 1936... kind of involved refusing to align with social democratic parties in europe, including germany, against the nazis, right? result.

"a mendacity that tips towards Holocaust denial"

Ugh, that's a weaselly line.

funnily enough, despite him being a stalinist running dog of the khomeni regime, i agree w./ seumas milne today.

this is an interesting, cat-among-the-pigeons article. has d'orr joined the guardian?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/17/collapse-of-the-left

"a shiver ran along the Labour back benches looking for a spine to run up"

Love this quote (from the comments) - originally from when Winnie Ewing beat Labour in a Hamilton by-election back in the 60s.

But Seamus Milne is just wrong here - it's not Cameron and Osborne that have ramraided Brown into talking about cuts, it's Alistair Darling. Because Labour were planning to make cuts all along, Brown was out and out lying to the electorate about it because it would mess up the clear 'Labour investment vs Tory cuts' dividing line he'd drawn for the next election campaign, and Darling knew that wouldn't wash.

Cameron and Osborne have executed a startling sleight of hand, persuading a large section of the public that the real crisis facing the country isn't the havoc wreaked on jobs and living standards by the breakdown of the free-market model — but the increase in government debt incurred to pay for it.

Also if this is the case then why has Brown been so toothless in reforming and regulating the financial sector he's had to bail out? Apart from the fact he's basically a free-market convert himself, and now the economy is getting a bit better he lacks the stomach to do anything other than bellow "bonuses are bad, stop it" without actually doing much about it.

it's my impression (based on a single source in higher education anyway) that much of the public sector was being told to prepare for cuts in the order of 10% from 2011 as early as this spring. and it wouldn't have taken a genius to predict them before that, really.

so it's true that brown was lying.

but SM is right insofar as fighting the deficit has somehow become the main agenda. so the fight is all about waste in public expenditure rather than about the city having crashed the economy. i wish i knew more about macroeconomics but my gut reaction is always that deficit hawks represent finance capital and a strong pound. whereas a weak pound is actually not that bad – good for exporters, reduces dependence on exports. but again, that is probably overly simplistic and stems from a simple visceral hatred of city boys.

i mean, brown is fucked either way because he toasted the city as it shafted us into the abyss. hey-ho.

xpost

Also if this is the case then why has Brown been so toothless in reforming and regulating the financial sector he's had to bail out? Apart from the fact he's basically a free-market convert himself, and now the economy is getting a bit better he lacks the stomach to do anything other than bellow "bonuses are bad, stop it" without actually doing much about it.

― Matt DC, Thursday, September 17, 2009 11:40 AM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

think you've answered your own question there!

You don't need to put macroeconomics on a pedestal. It's not that different from running a huge household budget. Basically the govt is spending far more than it earns via tax, and those taxes are going down.

i don't think a national economy is like a household one. it's a slightly separate issue from whether the agenda has been hijacked – the deficit is not the only issue. to whit (sp?), as SM says, our deficit isn't actually that much worse than comparable countries. and making deficit reduction the main priority may hurt the recovery. given that a lot of this (ie the strength of the pound) is to do with investor confidence, slashing cuts will not actually inspire that.

but SM is right insofar as fighting the deficit has somehow become the main agenda. so the fight is all about waste in public expenditure rather than about the city having crashed the economy.

Yeah I'd go with that. Also if you take out the money that was spent bailing out the banks, the budget deficit is I believe around the same as it was in 1996/97 - wish I could find the graph that illustrated that. I think I'm with Tombot on this ("who cares how much we spent, how much did we spend defeating one Hitler?") and actually the government would be better off focusing its efforts on fixing the broken banks on its books and getting them off the public balance sheet as soon as is sensibly possible.

Normally I would be contributing to this thread but I'm too depressed by the whole business to even finish this sentence adequately

This isn't relevant to the thread, but re higher education expecting cuts, further ed colleges all round the country have been fairly shafted by signing up to a government scheme to improve/expand their buildings and get the money back; plan has now been reneged on, leaving FE colleges having spent £££ on half-built sites they now can't afford to complete, in some cases having demolished the old buildings, some may have to shut down, etc

not that the great British public have ever been much moved to care about FE (not the universal button-push of primary+secondary ed nor the Our Future Boffins angle of HE), c.f. FE college A-level lecturers routinely getting abt a third less pay than those in school sixth forms, and left behind on every pay rise for schoolteachers

...that was just a rant I was reminded of and didn't have anywhere else to put, carry on

working for a local council I can add that anyone who's looking for money to do stuff has been told that they can fuck off on account of 10% cuts since, yeah, spring.

This'd all feel very nail in the coffin if there weren't already a thousand of them.

To what extent would significantly raising taxes on the financial sector harm the recovery? This would seem to be both fair and popular, and yet no one's mentioned it.

What do you mean by taxes on the financial sector?

i think the argument against goes: if you do this, all the entrepreneurial geniuses, who made the city the towering success it is, will flee the country for switzerland or ireland. which would be terrible, because who would we spend billions of pounds bailing out and paying bonuses to if they sodded off? i guess it's a non-starter motivated by the "politics of envy" :/

Also that the financial sector is pretty much all we've got left in Britain

Haha yeah that's the sticking point.

The Guardian has been prevented from reporting parliamentary proceedings on legal grounds which appear to call into question privileges guaranteeing free speech established under the 1688 Bill of Rights.

Today's published Commons order papers contain a question to be answered by a minister later this week. The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found.

Ahem.

Perhaps I'm being naive, but why would the government want to gag that enough to put up with all this fuss? Does that report reflect on them in some way that I'm missing?

Am I reading this wrong or isn't this more about Carter Ruck "protecting" it's clients than the government "gagging" anyone?

Or rather isn't the Guardian, in it's usual roundabout way, highlighting a problem with the law as it stands that may well be used by law firms from now on to prevent the reporting of parliament? i.e. if this goes unchallenged. The fact that I've seen the question in question on at least three different websites in the last couple of minutes (including wiki) makes the whole thing a bit silly.

lol twitter flashmob 2.0

This is the first story on Guido and lol at his insane commenteers who start off with "THIS IS IT PEOPLE - WE ARE NOW IN ENDTIMES" and then start getting into the McCanns and how the BNP wouldn't let this type of thing happen.

Well, if it was Carter-Ruck's intention to keep what Trafigura are up to out of the press it has well and truly fucked up.

oh twitter

"The gag is generally considered in the Blogosphere to be…"

we are going to GAG THEM

You can't prevent reporting of parliament. It takes place in public and it's proceedings get published in Hansard the next day anyway. I guess parliament itself could prohibit reporting, but I'm not sure it's ever met in camera, even during the war.

I must say that I don't actually see why this is supposed to prevent reporting of parliament - from what I've read, it seems to be an order to keep the company's documents confidential. If they're private documents, I guess that might be possible. If Paul Farrely reads them out in parliament, which he's entitled to do, they'd become public that way and i'm pretty sure they could then be reported that way, regardless of any court order. I may have got it wrong, I haven't read much yet, but I don't see why the big fuss.

Needs new thread.
Let's have a thread about the gagging order on reporting parliament because everyone else has one, and we wouldn't want to be though of as shirking our internet responsibilities.