Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

Also not nearly as funny as they think it is.

ok not in the guardian but this is just appalling

http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/laurie-penny/2010/11/british-war-poppy-carnage

British children are raised on the mythology of those wars [WWs I & II], in part because, particularly in the case of the Second World War, there were clear moral and practical reasons why conflict was unavoidable, and more to the point, we won.

yeah, it's probably just triumphalism

it should be doubly offensive, then, that almost a century later members of the British administration wear poppies while sending young people to fight and die far from home for causes they barely comprehend.

pretty sure dudes who volunteered for the forces have some idea of why they're in afghanistan-pakistan, but i guess they didn't go to a good college like laurie

It is understandable that friends and relatives of the fallen might wish to find meaning and purpose in the offensive futility of war

s0 unbelievably trite. she finds the 'futility' of war 'offensive'? offensive. really? that's the worst thing she can say about it? while belittling (and i think misunderstanding) the relatives and friends of the dead.

Mayne, you totally have, like, the *BIGGEST* squelching crush in the world on Laurie Penny, don't you?

nope. suzy aksed me to back up my dislike for her with hard stats -- et voila.

is the new statesman worth reading? every time someone here mentions it, it's to rip it to shreds

There are plenty of columnists who irritate or annoy me on a weekly or even daily basis, but you don't see me going and making endless complaints about them on every single thread ever. I think you have the biggest hard-on for Penny Red I've seen since the crush I had on Julian Casablancas when I used to complain about the Strokes on every other thread.

Like, this is the most blatant case of pigtail pulling I've ever seen.

Nick Lezard's column, detailing his ongoing descent into penury, can be funny. Paul Mason writes some dece things there.

Looking forward to History Mayne's Nina Power dossier btw.

sometimes they do a decent book review

politically it's been taken over by a bunch of young-ish, dimwitted tribalists, in the last couple of years -- nominally left-wing, but not hard thinkers

the editor is a complete lightweight, making his way up the ladder

it's always had problems, but was better under john kampfner/martin bright

xpost

oh god nick lezard? really?

you don't see me going and making endless complaints about them on every single thread ever

three threads, i think? two of them in response to other people (not me) posting something by laurie penny

i mean, if you like her work, defend it, but don't lean on some bullshit 'he's being mean about a gurle' line. im mean about all kinds of people.

The best thing in the New Statesman is Will Self reviewing fast food restaurants. Make of that what you may.

yeah exactly -- 1) isn't this kind of sunday supplement? 2) in 1996?

i'm asking mainly because the lovely Emma B is looking for a weekly politics/world affairs magazine that isn't basically right-wing

am totally getting a new left review subscription in the next few weeks fwiw

The Lezard column is funny in a laffing at him rather than with him way, incidentally. I'm sure he is under the impression he is the second coming of Jeffrey Bernard.

The state of the Staggers kind of mirrors that of the soft left and the Labour Party really, relatively callow, doesn't quite know what it stands for. My impression of Cowley is that he's a good magazine editor but not a political heavyweight to put it mildly. This is fine if you have people on the team who can compensate for that, but Mehdi Hassan is the bigger problem. Last time I looked its circulation was rising, which is an achievement in itself, but it's not really setting the agenda in the way it should be, especially now. Then again, neither is the Graun right now.

The Graun's still finding its feet as a Tory paper is why.

the new statesman has dropped out of the ABCs so circulation must be dire, backed up with some freebies maybe. its ownership is the problem, it needs to break free from factional labour politics.

I thought Robinson had sold it? But yeah, it still reads like the house organ of the Labour Party and it really shouldn't.

NLR is pretty good but pretty rarified as well - i know there isn't anything like this, but the ideal thing would a left-wing edition of the Economist

let's start it, I'm going for a nap and I expect a blueprint by 6pm or whenever I wake

Has Ms B tried the Englang edish of Le Monde Diplo?

i suspected all along that history mayne REALLY fancies david thomson

loool

Bizarre Love Quadrangle with Zizek and Eagleton iirc.

ha Stevie she already reads that in French!

most o_O about the staggers is the continuing career of john "Barack Obama is a glossy Uncle Tom" pilger

I thought Robinson had sold it?

you're right, i totally missed that. dunno why it's still so shit then.

I should reread Pilger's Distant Voices and Heroes to work out whether he was this weird when I was massively into him as a teenager or whether he's got worse over the years. I haven't been able to read his NS stuff a while now.

the new statesman has dropped out of the ABCs

What does this mean?

All future editions will be in cyrillic

ABCs are essentially the league table of circulation figures.

i suppose it's never been exactly mass-market

but when the writers have as little inherent authority as james mcintyre or laurie penny, it's hard to justify the way they get their views inflated into significance by other outlets, basically by trading on the name. bbc news progs frequently use them, because the political editor of the new statesman is traditionally someone to reckon with.

though of course the institute of ideas lot are an even more o_O-worthy group in that context.

It's also a symptom of the exhaustion of the centre-left in this country. The previous generation failed, quick invest your hopes heavily in youth.

Is that Claire Fox's lot? She's a piece of work. The institute of challops.

they're a hoot. don't save that drowning man, it would be patronising implying he can't swim

Lezard's NS column is a good counterpoint to the SlackDad column he used to do for the Guardian, which was all "Oh, I'm so relaxed about childcare, I just open a bottle of wine and let them get on with it. My wife otoh is a wondeful mother ... "

Fast forwad a few years, she's chucked him out & he's living in a bedsit.

lol. it's kind of an object lesson in the limits of self-knowledge. but it's also basically a less sympathetic ed reardon.

11.28am: David Cameron has said the pro-democracy leader's release was "a travesty" and long overdue.

I wish we had a pro-democracy leader

i'm asking mainly because the lovely Emma B is looking for a weekly politics/world affairs magazine that isn't basically right-wing

I used to write abstracts of NS articles and found that it comments on the news rather than giving you the news a lot of the time. Unlike the Economist, which might be right-wing but at least gives you a clearer idea of what the article you're reading is actually about. The NS is always saying things like "recent goings-on in Westminster mean..." but doesn't tell you what the recent goings-on might be, so you have to read something else anyway to find out about them.

I like The World Today, the monthly magazine from Chatham House. I get a nice roundup of world news and a bit of international relations theory thrown in.

John Lanchester has a great line about the Economist in Whoops!, along the lines of how the first 80% of any piece is brilliant, intelligent and meticulously researched but the last 20% is always: "on balance, unregulated free markets are the answer. The end."

they are particularly fond of the sentence "Perhaps."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/blog/2010/nov/14/sarah-palin-alaska-reality-tv

is the guardian the world's easiest paper to troll? who gives a shit about this except them?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/dec/08/chris-huhne-stays-cancun-talks

"Clegg decided that the long-term interests of the planet should take priority over the government's potential difficulties in tomorrow's vote, said the source."

in case you hadn't noticed, that's the PLANET Clegg took into account: waddaguy.

ha, thought of the guardian when i read this

While we’ve been chasing the “conversation” thing, people have drifted away from news because they’re seeing the conversation as fun and entertaining but not very worthwhile compared to really, really good journalism and really, really good reporting. I think that the emphasis that so many organizations have had over the past few years of concentrating on opinion-sharing has been a massive waste of time and resources – and actually almost a cultural crime, because that time and resources could have been put forth to something that was, you know, much more intellectually rigorous, and would have kept the brand… known for its news, rather than known for… being a collection of mad people.

blog.fawny.org/2010/12/14/hammersley-dld10/

That's very OTM.

God help me though, I instinctively scrolled down to read the fucking comments.

A top casting director once rushed up to me after Hero had sung in a cathedral in the south of France insisting that she hadn't seen that quality since casting a young Kate Winslet.

I tried to read that the other day for the lols, but couldn't get past the first sentence where she reveals she named her daughter Hero. What an awful person.