Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

Yeah, but I really felt I had to go there. He probably is was/an absolute arsehole tbf, but what teenager isn't? Your his mother Myserson, take some fucking responsibility.

I actually think I find her most contemptible for convincing herself that she's providing a great public service by talking about skunk as the scourge of middle-class society. What the fuck kind of evidence does this woman have to demonstrate this other than her own familial fucking anecdotes?

When was the last time she did any writing or research beyond her own dining room ffs? She threw her sun under a bus for the sake of self-aggrandizing and Paxman was bang otm in that interview on Monday.

This "OMG THIS NEW SKUNK IS A MUCH STRONGER VARIATION TEH CANNABIS" really pisses me off.
Yes it is strong and a dangerous drug, but it's the 'NEW' part that bothers me.
As far as my experience with cannabis goes - skunk has been the norm on the street for over 8 years.

New is in relative terms: the people who discuss it as such probably smoked regular grass back in the day.

the press has been calling it new for a long-ish time, to be fair.

paxman really otm, just watching it now

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/7934554.stm

WHAT I'D GIVE TO TRY SOME REGULAR GRASS

I wonder if Paxman will have her bounced from her Late Review gig.

people were regularly smoking "the kind" when i started college in 1992, which is like what, 17 fucking years ago now

skunk was fairly common when i smoked the reefer, more than eight years ago. or at least i was told it was skunk, whatever. but regular weed can turn you into a useless, boring, potentially paranoid and violent drugtard. i think the liberal press needed an excuse to go against the drugs when the teens of the 70s started having kids. OR SOMETHING.

it's all just conjecture. I can't believe something so highly personal and lacking in substance is even given airtime. She is just waffling on and on about a specific family situation.

I've always found "regular" weed/hash more likely to turn me into a monged out lethargo than mind-bending killer skunk, but that's probably just my violent delusions again.

And yeah skunk was around when I was at school in the lol early 90s.

oh my that paxman interview is quite something

"there is an emergency out there called skunk"

"we bought him clothes, we bought him sandwiches"

"and he sold both for drugzz..."

I'm disappointed that when she says "Oh there's lots of context you don't see" Paxman doesn't challenge her and say "well what a shit book then if you have to explain this on TV"

lol "skunk" good luck britain

This "OMG THIS NEW SKUNK IS A MUCH STRONGER VARIATION TEH CANNABIS" really pisses me off.
Yes it is strong and a dangerous drug, but it's the 'NEW' part that bothers me.
As far as my experience with cannabis goes - skunk has been the norm on the street for over 8 years.

wasn't there another article that was saying "upskirt" is some new phenomenon??

Skunk-smoking upskirters terrorising Julie Myerson.

Julie Myerson guilty of upskunking her son I think.

the dossier was skunked up

is this a Good Story

I think you mean A Good Story.

No. In all seriousness, I don't think it is. I'd have thought that to the vast majority of potential readers, it's a whinging middle-class cock-end whinging about middle-class cock-endry. A Good Story has (arguably) universal appeal; it's something about which (arguably) everyone is meant to have an opinion. This? Seriously, does anyone give a flying one?

(I am interested in what MC thinks, though. After all, it's his classification system!)

i don't understand why anybody would want to read a book that, from reading all of those articles, seems to be about how crap they were at parenting, that is not about what lessons they had learnt out of it (as there seems to be none), but some kind of celebration(?) of wow what a brilliantly tragic tale we have to tell?

is this what middle class people do instead of going on jeremy kyle?

i might write a book about how crap i am at my job

Just to agree with the people saying that skunk is hardly new. I smoked skunk in 1996 when I was 12.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/bd/Skunk_anansie-01.jpg

Skunk Anansie were an English rock band whose members included Skin (Deborah Dyer), Cass (Richard Lewis), Ace (Martin Kent) and Mark Richardson. The group formed in 1994 and disbanded in 2001. They were named after the West African folk tales of Anansie the spider-man[1], with “Skunk” added to “make the name nastier.”[2] They were often grouped as part of a Britrock movement, running alongside Britpop. The band in 2004, were named as one of the most-successful UK chart acts between 1952-2003 by Guinness Book of British Hit Singles & Albums, with a total of 141 weeks on both the singles and album charts ranking them at #491.[3] When the book first published this annual top 500 list in 2000, it only involved weeks spent on the singles chart until 2004's 17th edition, meaning the band's highest ranking has not been notified in any of the past editions. Their longest running release is 1996's Stoosh album with 55 weeks and a peak of #9.[3]

Raders are going to be disappointed she spends half the book banging on about her attempt to write the biography of a nineteenth century girl painter. (They are both lost children, do you see?)

Readers, that is.

Raders of the Lost Boy

Or the Lost Child or whatever it is.

im so confused about marijuana in the uk

Don't read anything to do with this Myerson stuff, then.

Stop smoking so much skunk, then.

otm

The families torn apart by teenage skunk epidemic

Bonus points for the Daily Mail hyperlink wording of "drugs-skunk-family' and bringing in the 'chief reporter', no less.

It is the end of a taboo: articulate, middle-class parents are speaking out about the nightmare of seeing their children spiral into drug abuse and, all too often, mental illness. Many blame themselves for staying silent, assuming that modern strains of cannabis were little different from the pot that baby boomers smoked at college. The reality is very different

The campaign to get the Myersons rehabilitated and back on the Clapham/Camden intelligensia dinner party circuit in well underway.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/13/global-economy-capitalism

ok what the fuck

this exact article -- which is pretty disgusting head-in-the-sand free-market fundie nonsense anyway -- was in the telegraph already.

Amusing headshot tho.
http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2008/12/17/1229519094151/andrew.jpg

i think it's good they publish people like simon jenkins and jenni russell but this fuckwit is a step too far.

I think he's basically correct (though I'm a lot less bothered about preserving incentives for risk-taking and innovation in the finance industry) Strange times. Strange bedfellows.

Dude in poingnant plight of a true believer when the true faith has ceased to be useful.

his whole premise is violently anti-social.

Don't get me wrong, I think the guy's a jizz-flake. He just seems like a jizz-flake who's too proud to do the whole 'we've always been at war with Eurasia' thing like most of his tribe.

Laura Barton patronises the nation, part one.

Lincolnshire was once a land of Roman forts and RAF stations, a county famed for iron mining, cabbages, cauliflowers, Thatcher. Today it has a population that is largely white and increasingly elderly, and a cluster of fading seaside resorts: Cleethorpes, Chapel St Leonards, Skegness.

just terrible writing. lincolnshire used to be famed for its cabbages; now it has fading sea resorts like skegness. which was practically san fucking tropez during the dim and distant thatcher regime.

she stopped short of long shadows across cricket fields

Last year, Skegness was named the country's most traditionally British town, where Britishness is measured in tearooms, cricket clubs, pubs, chip shops, holiday camps, stately homes and theatres. In Skegness there is one of each for every 162 residents.

One cricket club for every 162 people is pretty astonishing, to be fair.

Largely white? She means it wasn't so white when the Romans were building their forts?

Caecilius would happily greet an RAF pilot on his way to the baths. Then later they would both play cricket against a team of slave girls.