Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

ok she's been on the crackpipe with Toynbee, but jfc

Has a weird sideline writing about Health & Fitness as well.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GD54mbYWkAAXj80?format=jpg&name=large

Zoe Williams, still on drugs

conservative hq taping that to the office bulletin board

not like the Graun to employ tendentious pronouns in a headline

The long read on Algs and coffee shops was just so boring I couldn't get v far with it basically bcz I was thinking "er, old skool greasy cafes had the same look in the 70s" or "ppl have been complaining about homogeneity forever"

New article by Phil Space.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/jan/18/ben-whishaw-as-nick-cave-score-some-leftfield-music-biopic-ideas-here

how to bring the worst movie genre to new depths of cringe, took me 5 minutes.

The words in the link are enough for me cheers

It's a shocker.

Ian Watkins biopic

Suggested star: Nick Cave Suggested director: Gaspar Noe

Farrelly Brothers my preference

A textbook example of Brexit Derangement Syndrome.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/24/keir-starmer-donald-trump-special-relationship

"It’s hard to imagine the vindictive despot and the former human rights lawyer enjoying a ‘special relationship’"

And if Keith ignores him then so what?

quite amusingly, Kieth refused to publicly endorse genocide Joe in 2020

I know Starmer agrees with bombing Yemen, not sure if Trump does. Possible conflict there

Trump seems way less bomby than Kieth in general

Https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/jan/26/my-big-move-leaving-sydney-for-glasgow-suddenly-i-was-an-old-school-migrant-again

As one might expect of someone whose knowledge of Glasgow came entirely from Belle & Sebastian, this article seems fairly inoffensive and twee. Until, that is, we get to this howler:

Glasgow may be the most diverse city in Scotland but 88.3% of the population are Anglo-Saxon

... if it had been Edinburgh, fair enough.

Hmmmnnnyeah, if we're doing serious race science, lowland Scotland was settled by Saxons, and the language Scots is a branch of proto-English

But clearly much admixture with Picts and Gaels to form what eventually became the kingdom of Scotland.

<click>

Now, in this slide, observe the measurements of the half-breed Ibero-Celt/Saxon brain pan

The west of Scotland was not settled by Saxons.

... if we're going to be pedantic about it.

this is why I sent my DNA to a lab in Texas, I needed some scientific validation that says I'm NOT a fucking Anglo-Saxon!

I think you can take the author meaning Anglo-Saxon as "white" in this case

I know but obviously living in the West End of Glasgow, listening to Belle & Sebastian has not led to much of an understanding of Scottish sensibilities.

Also Partick now has a huge Chinese community and lots of Asian restaurants, supermarkets etc which she seems completely oblivious too.

This article was amended on 25 January 2024 to change a reference to ‘88.3% of the population’ of Scotland being ‘Anglo-Saxon’. What was meant was white.

quite!

it's a telling slip which speaks to how central anglo-saxonism still is to british racial ideology

this fucking site was started Belle & Sebastien fans, who of course are a white middle-class imperialism psy-op by the British Edinburgh deep state.

xp but now I guess the white ethnics are being conflated with wasps* since that distinction is not considered as relevant these days (except when it is - I'm not sure if UK whiteness is as smoothly assimilated as US whiteness but that's just a hunch)

*(using this terminology since idk what the UK equivalent would be)

proddy dogs

no wait

xps careful about calling out the twees in public they're very sensitive and easily provoked

If you want to get down to the stupidity of ancient DNA, I think I'm right in saying most of the English aren't even Anglo-Saxon, they're Britons.

the main problem with England here is that they couldn't contrive a monarch who fucked as much as Niall of the Nine Hostages, who worked towards a model of monarchy where half of the population are at least 5th cousins.

xp it's the other way around, I thought - when arseholes chat shit about being the indigenous settlers of the land, they mean the Britons, but there isn't anyone left who's pure Briton without some of that hyphenated Anglo-Saxon blood in them.

It's the same bullshit here. Ancient Celts my hole. Half of us are Normans.

it's essentially all bollocks is how i break it down

xp it's the other way around, I thought - when arseholes chat shit about being the indigenous settlers of the land, they mean the Britons, but there isn't anyone left who's pure Briton without some of that hyphenated Anglo-Saxon blood in them.

Historically at least, in England, it's always been about being Anglo-Saxon as opposed to ("Celtic") Britons, otherwise they may as well be Welsh and we can't have that. But NV OTM, of course.

a lot of it is legit hangover from 19th century calipers shit, also afaik it's still very much up for debate the extent to which the labels really describe cultural markers rather than genetic ones

I'm quite into the serious DNA science of this, after learning why I've got a genetic predisposition for alcohol abuse, am quite handy with an axe and don't mind being out in the cold!

*(using this terminology since idk what the UK equivalent would be)

That would be English.

Also Partick now has a huge Chinese community and lots of Asian restaurants, supermarkets etc which she seems completely oblivious too.

I'm reminded of this exchange from From Episode 12 of The Boaby Chronicles:

STUART (squirming slightly): Well, I think that's a... (*clears throat*)... a good question... em... I mean, Glasgow isn't as ethnically diverse as most American cities...
BOAB: Bollocks.
MODERATOR: Pardon me?
BOAB: There's loats o' Asians in Glesga fur a stert.
MODERATOR: Really? I had no idea, do you have... like a Chinatown?BOAB: Ye whit?
AL (to the moderator): He means South Asians.
BOAB: Aye, well a loat o’ them dae live in Pollokshields and Govanhill but ye dae get some north o' the river an' aw.

as far as celtic, brittonic, anglo-saxon, etc go I think there's still a lot of projection of modern national and racial categories going on even in good history because it's hard to think outside our familiar boxes and early "british" history/historiography seems like such a baffling and murky free for all with so much mythic baggage that looms way larger than whatever actual evidence we have

Good points all, it was absolutely poor word choice on my part, when people in question say indigenous they _don't_ mean the Britons (and so leave themselves open to cutting but useless irony) - but they don't mean Anglo-saxon either, they mean "shut up and let me be racist".

Yes, I was thinking more in terms of how English history was recorded and taught, which tended to erase the (foreign - "Welsh" literally means foreigner) "Celtic" aspects and emphasize the (English) Anglo-Saxon ones. I blame the Venerable Bede personally.

how do you base your nationalism on the alleged unification of two broad groups of "germanic" immigrants and still claim you're indigenous to these here isles?

incoherence only seems to make nationalism stronger which is immensely frustrating especially in this weird entity where we have nationalisms on top of nationalisms in a way that really shouldn't work

bede was literally trying to save souls and if it took making shit up it was worth it. what are today's nationalists trying to save? cucumber sandwiches? even the religious ones don't seem to believe in anything these days except insofar as belief is proxy for whatever national/racial identity they want to hold onto

https://imgur.com/a/32Wb8Au

so sayeth the man who was so upset by the prospect of a j. crobbins government that he gave himself a heart attack

https://i.imgur.com/VcTLEp6_d.jpg