Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

I'm sort of looking forward to finding out how ravaged the environment can get while these people cling to the idea of a green capitalism

"Our country has always led the way as a measured and decent example to the world", although there was that time we colluded with France and Israel to bomb Egypt and attack Port Said in order to regain control of the Suez Canal. That was a while back, though. And there's something queasy about name-dropping "my good friend Jo Cox" but I'm sure she means well.

"If 10 years ago we had invested in our own capacity for 5G technology, say, we would not find ourselves at the mercy of Huawei and the Chinese Communist party today" - are we at the mercy of Huawei? Isn't 5G technically a private sector thing? The government assigns the spectrum but the actual exploitation of the technology is up to the private sector, which can still remember the massive overbidding on 3G. Would higher-speed internet really make us independent from China?

I mean, technically this is party communication broadcast by The Guardian, as a contractual obligation, so it's not really The Guardian's voice. Wasn't there a chap a while back who was raising his dogs with a vegan diet? Not necessarily a bad idea, but it inevitably led to a flood of comments about how he was monster because he owned a pet. The constant tension between the environmental columnists and the people in the Comments section who want to reduce the human population with forced sterilisation is hilarious.

Didn't one of the columnists turn out to be working for Harvey Weinstein? The one who looked like Joe Strummer.

Labour comms seems to be fixated on presenting the party as being more reactionary, more conservative, more authoritarian, more committed to hardcore fiscal austerity than the Conservatives. Powell is probably one of the worst people in the shadow cabinet in terms of trying to spin this as something that might appeal to the electorate, because she can only do platitudes in series and is a complete fuckwit. It's so fucking empty and bleak it makes Cameron's feigning of being a One Nation Tory 10 years ago actually look more hopeful and progressive.

I may be wrong but I think Boris Johnson is done for. I can’t see his Tory cult surviving
Polly Toynbee

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jun/06/boris-johnson-tory-cult

What is the point of a columnist offering such an opinion with the qualification 'I may be wrong' ??

My column tomorrow: 'I may be wrong but I think Polly Toynbee is wrong, though she could be right - we'll have to wait and see!'

Polly Toynbee being right would be like Charlie Brown hoofing the football into orbit

When will Top Gear get back to its best? No time soon

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/jun/04/when-will-top-gear-get-back-to-its-best-no-time-soon

Is there a Guardian style guide that says all melty opinion pieces must mention how unpopular Corbyn was? I hate-read these things tensing for the inevitable.

They have found a Tory staffer who reads like a Guardian columnist, and is therefore a good Tory.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jun/06/tory-mps-boris-johnson-ministers-pm

A lot of them don’t have especially good non-political careers to fall back on, so being an MP is all they have.

secret Tory staffer describes a lot of the 17-19 intake as "low quality" because they aren't highly paid second job MPs!

it's a good time to make a stand for one's principles

Asked about the conduct described in the Sue Gray report, Boris Johnson told MPs: "I'd do it again."

— Patrick Maguire (@patrickkmaguire) June 6, 2022

secret Tory staffer describes a lot of the 17-19 intake as "low quality" because they aren't highly paid second job MPs!

A lot of awful northerners who can't speak properly, is what he meant to say.

it also sounds like they are saying that if they were more corrupt and greedy and less satisfied with the lot of the humble constituency MP then they'd be more likely to hold the government to account, rather than keeping a low profile.

I will be joining this boycott. and I would advise all trans, non-binary, LGBTQ+ people and allies to join this. The @Guardian should not be publishing fact-free mendacity about trans people in the way it does. I was beginning to think the paper was...https://t.co/RTKq2C6YGo

— Protect Trans Kids 🏳️‍⚧️ (@natachakennedy) June 9, 2022

Guardian:

Starmer’s allies say people should not underestimate the challenges he has faced since become leader: mending shattered party morale, fixing the antisemitism problem, and struggling to get Labour’s message across during the pandemic.

“I think he doesn’t get enough credit for segueing out of Corbynism without being pulled into a betrayal narrative,” said one senior party figure. “The membership know what he’s trying to do. He’s taken them on a journey and they’re now his members and they’re his people.”

i stand in solidarity with the trans journalists who have expressed disgust over recent editorial decisions by the guardian.

i have pulled my upcoming pride article with them, as a cis ally it’s my responsibility to work towards enacting change. sending love x https://t.co/KhmBuYBxko

— buy my book, link in bio 🔪 (@sharandhaliwal_) June 10, 2022

Kieth is such a smooth operator that apart from the 100000+ members that cancelled their debit/cut their cards or got purged, they are on a journey and barely even noticed his pivot towards a depressingly vacuous brand of politics that is even more negative and unappealing than 2nd term to late blairite Labour (austerity, racism, authoritarianism, ...etc). lol there was a type out there that was enthusiastically "his people" but now they've had their head turned by another bland PLP centre-right machine politician cos he's taller than him or more *talented* or something like that

“I think he doesn’t get enough credit for segueing out of Corbynism without being pulled into a betrayal narrative,”

this is maybe the stupidest thing i've ever read

Yes.

From the same article:

In the meantime, as one shadow minister put it, “I think we’re all a bit puzzled, really. Everyone wants to help and wants to make it succeed, but how do we do that?”

The puzzlement of people who stand for nothing and believe in nothing, wondering why potential Labour voters don't display the same levels of Blairite vacuousness in their own worldviews.

xp

the Graun will uncritically quote anything from seasoned old bullshit merchants in the PLP, no matter how implausible and stupid it is. Most of their more senior writers built their careers on doing a lot of this. But also it says they don't really think that the 10k per week members Labour were haemorrhaging at various points of his leadership is part of any narrative, because they simply don't count as people.

I’m fed up with discussions positing that various cohorts of voters are more ‘real’ than others.

the realness vibe is the essence of Nu Lab's patronising, social worker/missionary excuse system

when i started at SureStart i piped up in an early team meeting that we weren't fucking missionaries and the point was to support people not rescue them

it didn't really play, sadly

"Experts say that no matter how righteous, extremist protests are risky: they may turn people against the cause"

i can't think of a better epitaph for the guardian

Good.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/jun/13/arron-banks-loses-libel-action-against-reporter-carole-cadwalladr-guardian-defamation-brexit-russia

tbh, I don’t think this is a great outcome if we’re looking at journalism having baseline standards.

Cadwalladr accepts that the meaning of her words was defamatory. She accepts that the defamatory claim was untrue. If she repeated it again today, she’d be guilty of libelling Banks.

Her defence is that there was a public interest justification for what she intended to say, rather than what she said.

My reaction is more to do with that vile creature than Carole. She's not exactly a model to follow.

What seems to have happened here is that Banks overplayed his hand. He could not demonstrate significant distress or damage, and by pursuing the case beyond Cadwalladr's apology and retraction, he strengthened the 'public interest' defence. https://t.co/T8RX0XfaKP

— Elvis Buñuelo (@Mr_Considerate) June 13, 2022

Looks like Banks will appeal.

not to me he won't

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FVTJXKOWYAAld_O?format=jpg&name=medium

It amazes me that in the face of such a fascistically evil policy that self-important posh graun liberals are affecting the view that it's all about them. Well no it doesn't really surprise me that much, but it amazes me the way they seem not very good at masking what awful fucking people they are when UK govt is almost literally doing a version of the Madagascar Plan and rather than talk about the human cost of this, this is ALL ABOUT THEM!

lol they changed the title pic.twitter.com/4zpHJM5tCW

— Mimi "means ear in Japanese" McGann (@MimiMcGann) June 15, 2022

Corbyn:

“I have absolutely no illusions in the Guardian, none whatsoever. My mum brought me up to read the Guardian. She said, ‘It’s a good paper you can trust’. You can’t. After their treatment of me, I do not trust the Guardian.”https://t.co/c1l93JCb2Y

— Media Lens (@medialens) June 22, 2022

Apparently the Guardian is worse than it used to be.

On the subject of it being "all about them" I'm reminded of this piece from many years ago:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/22/george-osborne-ruined-yoga-retreat

"*I just came back from my annual yoga retreat high up a forested Italian hill. All there is to hear in this delightful spot is the onomatopoeic call of the hoopoe and the oddly strangulated cry of whatever raptor it is that likes to swoop over the valley. ... It was into this idyll that I crashed - I and my mobile phone and my urgent hackish need to redraft a very long article on the state of the BBC, a redraft necessitated by George Osborne’s decision in the 8 July budget to land the corporation with the cost of licence fees for the over-75s, previously footed by the government.*"

There is in fact a "yoga holidays" section:
https://www.theguardian.com/travel/yoga-holidays

Flicking through the writer's content I'm surprised to see that they didn't write about their annual yoga holiday every again. I'm also reminded that these people - these people - have to write two pieces a month, one of which can be some guff about the correct orientation of toilet roll. It's just a vehicle to move money from the Guardian's fund into the pockets of the editor's friends, isn't it? As a reward for fighting the good fight. The opinion section at least.

The resulting piece was presumably this, which to be fair is a long, complex, sourced, well-researched thought piece of a type that would utterly defeat me:
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/jul/14/battle-for-the-bbc

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jun/26/labour-has-now-claimed-the-centre-ground-and-has-shown-it-can-win

Nothing like a frothing hate-read to start your Sunday off with a bang

I would argue with any PLP gonad that supporting striking workers and wanting nationalisation of utilities and monopolies, as favoured by 60-70 per cent of the voting age population, is now the policy of the centre.

courageous stand by sir kieth to pledge to improve the economy, don’t know why no one has ever thought of this. tories caught flat footed once again by this inspiring leader

of course The Observer has to maintain its rep as being even more frothingly sensible than the Graun, also nice of them to let Kieth get his own obituary piece in

This trans 'debate' is going over to the sports pages. This is a really good piece, which followed up from a favourable write-up of Dorries' remarks a few days ago.

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2022/jun/28/nadine-dorries-offers-the-illusion-of-easy-choices-while-trans-athletes-pay-the-price

That is indeed a really good piece. You love to see it

There was a counter to that piece. Really vile.

---

Meanwhile,

This information is factual untrue. The military air base is not involved. Please contact belgian armen forces press office.

— Belgian Air Force🇧🇪 (@BeAirForce) June 28, 2022

Is Matt Hancock worse than he used to be? Seems about the same tbh - a wastrel thicko in the pocket of big business, why the Graun feel they need to print this piffle is absolutely beyond me.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jun/30/covid-uk-cases-vaccines-matt-hancock

Delete this

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/jul/06/nadhim-zahawi-is-new-chancellor-going-to-change-direction-on-economy

I can think of some other people who should step down. pic.twitter.com/coBM4eSID3

— Elvis Buñuelo (@Mr_Considerate) July 7, 2022

This article isn't helped by the profile picture, which unfortunately makes it look as though the author is smirking:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jul/04/im-sure-robots-are-very-nice-but-i-dont-want-them-picking-my-fruit

"I once spent an interesting few nights in New Zealand, sharing a motel with about 50 apple-pickers from Vanuatu, Samoa and beyond. We listened to reggae, washed our pants in the sink and smoked cigarettes as they told me about thinning out baby apples, and picking pineapples and peaches.

After nursery, I often cycle my son half an hour out of town to a farm where you can pick strawberries and raspberries and rip artichokes off huge green thistles. He loves it. He is animated and delighted by the smell of plants, the feel of soil, the art of guessing which is the most delicious.

I fear that robotic fruit-pickers might be just another step that takes us away from understanding how our food is grown: the swarms of plastic packaging, the brightly lit supermarket aisles, the insulated doorstep deliveries and plucked, cut, washed and sliced ingredients."

You can tell an article is juicy when it has hundreds of comments but the Guardian Pick only has a dozen upvotes, or in this case there isn't a selected comment because no-one was on the author's side.

Hot weather warning: rosé wine becomes 350 times stronger in the heat
Zoe Williams
Boozing in the sun can lead to ejection from Wimbledon finals – or falling asleep in your clothes two days in a row. I’m only guilty of one of those

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jul/11/hot-weather-warning-rose-wine-becomes-350-times-stronger-in-the-heat

windmill jolyon going off on nick cohen, u luv 2 see it

I have in my possession some relatively recent screenshots in which Nick Cohen offers to go to the toilet at the newsroom at the Observer, strip off, take a naked photo of himself and send it to a junior female freelancer.

— Jo Maugham (@JolyonMaugham) July 13, 2022

much more in the thread, none of it good

"i'd like to see how Cohen wriggles out of this one"

Needs to lose everything, and more.