Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

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

...the fuck?

As the Press Association reports, some 57% of people surveyed in spring 2016 said it was a good thing for EU citizens to have the right to work in the UK. By spring 2018 this figure had jumped to 68% - the biggest increase reported by any of the EU’s 28 member states.

This shift is probably related to the fact that, since the EU referendum, there has been a sharp fall in immigration from the EU. (People might be more inclined to say they favour EU workers being able to come to the UK if they see fewer of them.)

Who wrote that?

What the fuck is the gigantic populism thing all over the front page today?

Lol, just came here to post about the populism thing. Absolute tosh, the research methodology is obviously bullshit and the reporting on it is sub-undergrad. This nugget:

"May’s public speeches were classified on average as at least “somewhat populist” in the research, which examined the discourse of prime ministers and presidents of all the major countries in Europe and the Americas in the last two decades. That made May the second-most populist female leader out of 138 heads of government since the turn of the century."

What is this supposed to tell me. How many of the 138 are women, where out of 138 does she rank. This is information rendered completely incoherent. I wouldn't mind if the way of assessing what constitutes populist rhetoric was not so saturated with normative assumptions about, uh, whatever the opposite of populist is supposed to be:

"Researchers identified several examples where May offered a romanticised description of “ordinary working people” pitted against a self-serving elite, a defining feature of populism."

That is, a critique of structural inequality is populist. It is a threadbare attempt to undergird their centrist extremist editorial line with some "scientific" rationality but as an exercise it is entirely tautologous.

Lmao if #1 populist female leader was angela merkel

"Researchers identified several examples where May offered a romanticised description of “ordinary working people” pitted against a self-serving elite, a defining feature of populism."
That is, a critique of structural inequality is populist. It is a threadbare attempt to undergird their centrist extremist editorial line with some "scientific" rationality but as an exercise it is entirely tautologous.

Bolsonaro somewhere between ‘not populist’ and ‘somewhat populist’.

Obviously people need to put food on the table but idk if there is going to be a breaking point for some of the genuinely left-leaning writers still contributing to The Guardian. They’re getting increasingly vocal on Twitter.

Who wrote that?

― gyac, Wednesday, 6 March 2019 18:52 (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i'm not sure, it was in one of their rolling politics liveblog things. kind of felt the bottom drop out of my stomach when i read that tbh

There’s a lot of kvetching about Owen Jones by jobbing journos on FB journo forums, insinuating that his colleagues hate him and so forth. Professional jealousy’s a great thing, especially when they try to say he’s Not A Real Journalist. IMO anyone who starts as a Parliamentary researcher has the same skill set.

apart from which, and i could be wrong here, but then again i'm not writing for the guardian about it, everything i've ever read about attitudes to immigrants says it's people with the least first-hand experience living cheek by jowl with "them" that have the worst attitudes. but hey, don't let that stop you making unsourced speculation about what is "probably" the reason behind the dramatic statistic that provided the basis for the headline on your "most viewed" article of the day

xpost

xxp pretty much a broad swathe of the well paid and recognisable commenters do this publicly on twitter every single day to the extent of following troll accounts that mock him and liking tweets that justify him being harassed ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

i'm not sure

Nadeem Badshah - but it's straight out of the book of James Ball data journalism.

No the actual wording was by Andrew Sparrow, I went back and checked. Not that I’d ever insinuate he has dodgy views on that liveblog...

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/mar/12/i-met-my-girlfriends-parents-and-realised-i-had-once-slept-with-her-father

She is not as bad as Mariella but this is really, really bad advice

"Five years ago, I went through a bi phase and used to sleep around with pretty much everyone that came along, including other men"

this is kind of what "bi" has to mean in this context isn't it? (i.e. it's a man speaking plus he's already said he slept with the dad?)

L.A.F.F Like a Fatherfucker.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/mar/12/i-met-my-girlfriends-parents-and-realised-i-had-once-slept-with-her-father

She is not as bad as Mariella but this is really, really bad advice

― xyzzzz__, Tuesday, March 12, 2019 12:09 PM (seventeen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

would your advice be "tell your girlfriend you've shagged her da then propose"?

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/apr/12/tell-fiancee-i-am-bisexual-and-had-sex-with-her-dad-mariella-frostrup

She does manage to provide exactly the same advice as Mariella did 4 years ago though...

If so, life truly is stranger than fiction.

Quite, Mariella.

I agree with the tail end of the alphabet, just tell her and see if you can work it out. Far better than vanishing into thin air.

by telling her you'd be potentially breaking up her parent's marriage and badly affecting her relationship with her father

I am not sure about what the advice would be, exactly, but just disappearing -- and also writing that up in such a casual way -- surely isn't it?!

by "walk away" i assume she means break-off the relationship, not necessarily ghost

Telling her wouldn't be my advice. I don't know - was just sorta taken aback about the advice and the way it was given (I'd like to see some thinking about the situation)

how do you break up with her? do you just make something up. that seems really weird.

i'd rat totally her dad out since he is at every stage the villain here (assuming i got myself in this ticklish situation which er)

My advice would be, the next time they have sex, to casually say, "You're even better than your dad".

Even worse, “wow, feels just like your dad’s.”

The author had a weird incest question last week too...

how do you break up with her? do you just make something up. that seems really weird.

― plax (ico), Tuesday, March 12, 2019 1:07 PM (seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it does.

telling her that you've shagged her da also seems weird

how hard can it be to fake your own death?