Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

I should probably have put low-income instead of working class there in the part about the systemic preservation of it.

Ah, I see what you mean. That sounds like a very US-specific (and frankly depressing) take on the working class. Not that other countries don't have this problem, it's just less prevalent. Such is my impression, at least.

As ogmor said there is a similar fetishization of the working class in the UK, not least amongst working class people ourselves. It coexists alongside the prejudices and discrimination that working class people experience everywhere in the world.

I was trying to find the exact definitions of working class, blue collar, low-income etc. Because a lot of blue collar jobs pay really, really well. I almost became a union electrician in my 20s.

see also political candidates talking about how they come from a long line of ranchers or steel mill workers but leave out that their ranch land has oil rigs on it or their daddy owned all the steel mills.

One of the fun complications of most class structures is it's not just about money. I think that partly accounts for the frequent exclusion of people of colour from some notions of working classness. Wrong notions, obv.

loads of middle class kids go into apprenticeships the electrical/plumbing trades in this era, huff up a bit of asbestos, get some tribal tats, earn some good money, act like they talk like idiot yobs in front of their parents!

That man of the people thing that scumbag politicians and clueless poshoes do is kind of multivalent and class fluid depending on their audience I think.

Just because venal right-wing politicians are apt at manipulating the working class by stoking its sense of pride, doesn't mean the sociological category is itself meaningless and unredeemable. If anything, this kind of thinking may further strengthen the conmen's position.

I used to to work with this young guttermouth Whose dad "worked in a prison". Lol he didn't mention he was an actual professor and taught degree courses in maths!

I don't think anybody here is saying it doesn't have value as a category? If nothing else, in the UK at least, it feels bred into you on a deep social and cultural level.

I think most cultures have some version of this fetischization of the working class: honest, hard working folks who form the backbone of Our Great Nation. It's an easy way for the powerful to keep people in their place.

karl marx 2 thraed

Yeah, I just don't know why coming out as "working class" is something to write about as he has; it's a bootstraps story by a relatively attractive, able bodied , white, american man who acknowledges one can't readily determine his sexuality and that he overlooked that his classmates/friends were also working class (ok, you dick). A better take would've been the complete diversity of the university experience going against the current tale that all professors are coastal elites trying to indoctrinate the children with its liberalist gay frog agenda. Between frat parties and MBA resume drops.

I think most cultures have some version of this fetischization of the working class: honest, hard working folks who form the backbone of Our Great Nation. It's an easy way for the powerful to keep people in their place.

For sure, it's just that when you augment it with the frontier cowboy, hyper-individualist credo of pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps, its worst aspects are exacerbated, since you piss all over the Marxist aim of emancipation from systemic oppression. This isn't unique to the US, of course, it's just more common there. Or so it seems to me.

I totally did not follow that. Are you saying mocking the bootstraps trope that some people use sincerely (like the guy in the essay) makes things worse?

No, I'm saying that the US more readily fuses the (individualist) bootstraps trope with the (originally antagonistic, i.e. collectivist and Marxist) notion of 'working class', thus cancelling out any hope for systemic liberation via this particular term.

xp most industrialised cultures. the honest hard-working thing is a flash in the pan historically

xpost ah, yes. My problem with the essay.

there's plenty of classical era shit abt the value of work but obv agriculture is the original industry, the two go hand in hand

Not unrelated (from NZ rather than the US, however):

https://scontent-lhr3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/40666668_1860613067392597_8932870211413999616_n.jpg?_nc_cat=108&_nc_ht=scontent-lhr3-1.xx&oh=c0601cc253b0fe11317b79633b5ad41a&oe=5C7A5D4D

This is great if you want to give yourself an aneurism:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2018/nov/21/how-populist-are-you-quiz

excited to announce that I've been given five articles by The Guardian to explain this political chart! pic.twitter.com/qFfgdrlwEP

— ʙʀᴇxɪᴛ (@Eff__Jay) November 21, 2018

What's wrong with being populary?

This year there has been no avoiding the superstar psychologist from Canada Jordan B Peterson, and if you want to know what he thinks about lobsters and hierarchy you’ll probably have to read his multimillion-selling 12 Rules for Life (Allen Lane). It is both less evil and more eccentric than widely described: those hoping to hate-read it as an “alt-right” screed (or to hate-gift it to someone they don’t like) will be disappointed to find that, far from being some kind of crypto-fascist, Peterson is really a conservative existentialist, a bit like a more sciencey Roger Scruton.

Guardian best books of 2018.

Can't believe there's some pig-thick nazi apologists writing in the Graun

my book is the best book of 2018 so yes the guardian is getting worse

Scruton did the full English Breakfast of not very cryptofascist at all complaints on radio 4 last night: PC gone mad, offence archaeology, the invention of islamophobia, Witchunts etc... Probably not the best comparison to make when trying to make JP sound more respectable to libs!

A less scrutony Roger Science.

... sorry, more. LOL Jordan Peterson + science.

tbh it's Jung I feel sorry for

He particularly concerns himself with the abuse of language and has written two books on the subject: Unspeak (2006) and Who Touched Base In My Thought Shower? (2013).

oh wait, lol, is this steven poole's selection? unspeak was pretty good (the book and the blog abt political language deployed to obscure) but i disliked his book on bad cookery writing (even when much of it was and is actually very bad)

Unspeak looks ok but the rest of his stuff is some "pedant's corner pretending to be baffled by how language actually functions irl" cobblers

yes he def went downhill. also he's a bit of a dick on twitter

also we once had an argument on his blog abt baudrillard and the concept of simulation so who's the dick again *surprise reveal*

Terrific piece on Rusbridger's book: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n23/james-meek/the-club-and-the-mob

Although I will sadly have to see the 'Three Little Pigs' commercial now.

Washington Post is suggesting they may have bungled one of their biggest ‘scoops’ of the year:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/the-guardian-offered-a-bombshell-story-about-paul-manafort-it-still-hasnt-detonated/2018/12/03/60e38182-f71c-11e8-863c-9e2f864d47e7_story.html

The lead reporter on the Manafort article, Luke Harding, declined to comment on Monday and referred questions to the newspaper’s spokesman, Brendan O’Grady.

In response to questions, O’Grady reissued the same statement the Guardian has stuck by for the past six days: “This story relied on a number of sources. We put these allegations to both Paul Manafort and Julian Assange’s representatives prior to publication. Neither responded to deny the visits taking place. We have since updated the story to reflect their denials.”

WikiLeaks on Monday identified the alleged fabricator as Fernando Villavicencio, an Ecuadoran journalist and activist. A government ministry under Ecuador’s previous government accused Villavicencio of fabricating documents; Villavicencio’s supporters call him a crusading journalist who exposed corruption under former president Rafael Correa.

Villavicencio’s byline appears on the Guardian’s Manafort article, but only in the newspaper’s print edition, which doesn’t circulate widely outside Great Britain. O’Grady declined to explain why Villavicencio’s name was left off the Web version of the article, which was viewed around the world last week

At the very least, having a controversial critic of the last Ecuadorean government, who had been accused of forging evidence the Guardian previously relied on for a story, co-author the piece and then taking his name off the online version looks sloppy and suspicious.

A piece on The Gurdian's coverage of Brazilian affairs:

In 2011, with Rousseff now in office, Phillips published this article on a supposed wave of “anti-establishment” comedians, featuring notorious far-right comic Danilo Gentili. ”Vote for Dilma because she was tortured?” he quipped. “Fuck that. Did I ask her to be?”, “Seriously,” he went on, drawing nervous giggles from the packed audience. “A president has to be smart. If she was caught and tortured, it’s because she was an idiot.” “It was the edgiest moment in an 80-minute monologue – attempting to poke fun at a woman who had been brutally tortured by the dictatorship. But Gentili, 32, a highly controversial but also wildly popular comedian who is blazing a trail for stand-up comedy in South America’s largest nation, is a man who enjoys living on the edge.” gushed Phillips. Accused of misogyny, homophobia, and investigated for racism, Gentili went on to be a vocal advocate of Dilma’s ouster, and one of Neofascist Jair Bolsonaro’s most high profile supporters. In the years prior to his election, Gentili invited him regularly onto his TV chat show “The Night”, whose other guests included a serving UK Ambassador. Ustra, the secret police chief responsible for Rousseff’s two year long torture which included electric shocks to her vagina, was later eulogised by Jair Bolsonaro during his vote for her impeachment. Living on the edge, indeed.

Can anyone out-dance Theresa May? The greatest movers in politics – ranked!

funnily enough my doctor prescribed me "a modicum of fun" and the Graun duly delivered the prescription. ho ho ho all the way to The Samaritans suicide line.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/14/britains-not-all-bad-its-still-got-melvyn-bragg-marmite-and-free-museums

Seems a bit...tone deaf? I mean, no amount of Melvyn Bragg will help people using food banks.

Yay Britain's got proudness

I love both In Our Time and Marmite - but how much succour and support you can draw from these undoubtedly good things is quite limited + ain't gonna save you from hard times at all. It's such a tonic to see the writer lives in New York but still sees UK as "home" - all in this together eh?

people who are "proud to be from [insert nation state]" are a phenomenon i will never understand

We're supposed to be proud of Melvyn Bragg?

please donate to support our high quality investigative journalism https://t.co/UDagxmElYn

— General Boles (@GeneralBoles) January 21, 2019

You could link literally any John Harris gammon safari but his trip to NI, two years in, is just as full of shit even when he supposedly sympathises:

Here and elsewhere, there was exasperation at the historical accident that had made Theresa May dependent on the Democratic Unionist party

In the tiny southern Irish border town of Clones

Thanks to an arcane scandal about government subsidies for renewable fuels – which involved vast amounts of wasted public money – and tensions between Sinn Féin and the DUP over the Irish language, there has been no devolved government since January 2017.

And stark regional inequalities have yet to be tackled: for all its cultural vivacity, Derry has deep-seated problems with unemployment, and a gross median wage £69 per week lower than in Northern Ireland as a whole.

Anyway tl;dr, not sure what publishing this muck is doing besides keeping Harris in shit clichés and annoying basically everyone else.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/feb/12/irish-brexit-northern-ireland-young-people the muck in question

I think I'll end up reading the JH travesty-log where he gets kidnapped by some rough-as Batley crack dealers who scald his balls with boiling water while making him sing Whitney houston hits.

As the scalding water drew near my quivering sack, my thoughts were chiefly concerned with the plight of these people. If their very real and legitimate concerns had been heard, might I not be in this situation?