Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

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?

lolz

fp'd u both for making me think about john harris' scrote, which in my imagination has a little gurning john harris face on it like a testicular kuato

when you get these completely incurious, equally ignorant and smug ex-music hacks (see also Macaroni fucking Maconie) going on a voyage of discovery into the provinces - you always get a strong feeling that against all odds their own ignorant + prejudiced first thoughts on these ppl turned out to be uncannily correct, as backed up by their impeccable research.

Simon Hedges has finally got that columnist spot he has long dreamed of
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/feb/26/independent-group-lib-dems-vince-cable-westminster-sdp

As soon as possible, the Lib Dems should join the Independent Group in parliament. I suggest this partly for the good of the independents. Joining the 11 Lib Dems (plus Stephen Lloyd, who resigned the whip recently, but who would surely then follow suit) would double their size and give them momentum. The new group would then be almost two-thirds of the way to becoming the third largest party (currently the SNP with 35 seats), and closer to the public funding attached for policymaking.

the third largest party which no-one voted for, what could possibly go wrong

This is just too on the nose

David Boyle is policy director of the radical centre thinktank Radix

https://www.societyofauthors.org/SOA/MediaLibrary/SOAWebsite/Blogs-and-Interviews/David-Boyle-landscape.jpg?ext=.jpg

that's weird he doesn't look like a Lib Dem

the fuck is a radical centre

you skateboard in support of the status quo

this week i think it's rolling back the welfare state but within the EU

This Jonathan Watts article on concrete yesterday reads like it has either not been edited enough or has been edited too much

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/feb/25/concrete-the-most-destructive-material-on-earth

bunch of bloody reactionaries on here never give centrists a fair hearing. i'd give them all a fair hearing .. and then liquidate the fucking lot of them!

harsh but fair hearing

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/feb/26/independent-group-nandos-photo

Really glad someone got paid money to write this inane shit into an article. Guardian obviously isn’t hard up if it can run muck like this.

hannah jane parkinson is the guardian's young centrist hope it seems

As opposed to etc etc etc

iirc this is basically an expanded version of a couple of tweets for which she got deservedly rinsed so I salute her indefatigability if nothing else