Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

I did not know that A A Gill was married to Amber Rudd.

How bonkers.

Now this is the kind of thing a newspaper is for, you wouldn't see this in the Mail:

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/oct/29/jacob-rees-mogg-my-early-career-as-an-avant-garde-film-star

I mean

it's interesting

just disappointed that they were given time with jrm and didn't use it to deck him

I was at Labour's official campaign launch yesterday.

JC was inspirational.

The Guardian immediately reported it as: Doubts about JC's future.

tbf I don't think him being inspirational and there being doubts abt JC's future aren't mutually exclusive

There's an (I assume) unintended extra negative in there but otm.

Aye, too much negatives as it is.

They could have reported that he was inspirational.

No one in the thousand-plus audience heard JC, or saw the whole shadow cabinet on stage, and thought: I have doubts about JC's future.

It was a media idea, inserted by the media, which the media then reported.

They might as well have asked a question about anything completely unrelated to JC's speech -- then reported this as the story.

JC's speech said many things - notably about policy. Might be an idea to report on that, rather than things he didn't say and didn't prompt anyone to think about, except cynical media people who come with their own agendas and presumably have contempt for 99% of the people in the room.

if they report on policy though people might start liking the direction in which corbyn wants to take the country, which would be an unconscionable dereliction of duty on the part of the uk press

pic.twitter.com/u1qJqjqr1s

— Peter (@pickyouredge) November 1, 2019

Remember when she won a prize?

I am not Jewish though maybe I am? Mother was adopted. But I am enough of an "asocial" as they were known then to know I would have been made to turn left in the camps. That is all the knowledge I need . This does not make me a Tory just someone who has read some history

— suzanne moore (@suzanne_moore) October 30, 2019

you alright Suze?

*makes drinky motion*

oh i know what drunk posting looks like :D

XD XD XD

Followed by a, b and 20 others you follow

Looks like we found out what drunk following looks like as well

I think I followed her a few years ago, but I'm not now so must have unfollowed at some point. I don't really use Twitter much though

Reading this article about abuse towards female MPs - which doesn’t mention Diane Abbott once - and almost choked at this

Last week’s warning from the archbishop of Canterbury, about “inflammatory language” in politics, has yet to prompt any constructive response from the two second-raters apparently determined to keep the forthcoming leaders’ debate all-male. Maybe Barack Obama’s criticism of polarising language will be more effective?

Turning to the judgmental language of indignant wokeness, mentioned by Obama, some of Jeremy Corbyn’s most valued supporters have been keen deployers, when narked, of “terf” (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) and the antisemitic “Zio”.

All those years writing for the Mail on Sunday weren’t in vain, eh?

these poor people, labelled terfs just because they want trans people to kill themselves

The complaint about the leaders debate being all-male might have some traction if the excluded leader wasn't Jo Swindon and she wasn't transparently playing on it for all its worth.

The mention of Obama is a bit eeeurgh, like you know what this woman would have said about him if he’d actually spoken up for himself more.

Found this take on the JRM news story a bit odd:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/nov/05/too-late-rees-mogg-faces-furious-backlash-over-grenfell-apology-stormzy

It's not actually The Guardian, and she may be fantastic, but I became irrationally angry after reading the first paragraph or so of this story about a budding playwright:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-50239981

"Phoebe Eclair-Powell writes plays fuelled by her outrage at shocking stories she spots in newspapers. She has now won Europe's biggest playwriting prize - and says she has learned a lot by writing for Hollyoaks and from her mum Jenny Eclair."

I wonder how she got her big break. Also, I learn that she is working on several other TV shows, "including an adaptation of Joe Sugg's graphic novel Username: Evie..."

Has Joe Sugg really written a graphic novel? Again, this isn't The Guardian yet, but there's bound to be a certain amount of cross-pollination.

Phoebe Hyphenated-Name meme alert.

I did not previously know who Joe Sugg is but just googled and although his name is the sole author on the cover, it was written by Matt Whyman, draw by Amrit Birdi, coloured by Joaquin Pereyra, and lettered by Mindy Lopkin, who are credited inside as The Sugg Squad.

I first thought up the storyline and all the characters. At the beginning they were all named after colours so I think Evie was originally named Blue, Jaspar was Green, Mallory was Red and I think Unity’s always been Unity. I made the storyline first and then worked with Matt, the writer we had to shape it up, to make it into a proper story. My initial plot for the book was so long, so we had to get a professional in to tighten it up and make sure it had a start, middle and end. So, we did that and I fiddled with the characters a bit more and gave them names, which I did with my viewers by putting an online poll out and they chose the name ‘Evie’,

joe sugg is the klf and i claim my £5

Our Hannah is v into Joe Sugg, she had a big blogger phase a few years back and I think Zoella was her gateway drug. She tells me the boy can sing, he was in Waitress in the west end earlier in the year but I dunno, I hate stunt casting and I kinda hate bloggers, the evil of banality.

Sorry stupid kindle spellchecked vloggers and I didn't notice

accessing it on two devices and three browsers so far today every page loads somewhere near the middle or bottom so i have to scroll up.

content blockers are your friend in this regard

does reading mode work in safari for this?

this is probably not what TB-L envisaged

http://www.koogy.clara.co.uk/guardian.jpg

but reading mode in firefox seems to work.

This is actually quite nice

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/dec/21/ilhan-omar-tan-dhesi-our-country-as-well-racism-bollywood-change

The French situation – I didn’t understand how tragic it was until I met a young woman who was Muslim, who was newly elected to a city council in France and came to Minnesota as part of a delegation. She had her headscarf on and I walked in with my hijab, and she started crying. I was running five minutes late and I thought I had disrespected her, so I was, like, I’m sorry, I had to drop off my kids, I didn’t mean to be late! And she said no, no, that’s not why I’m crying! I’m crying because I saw pictures of you with your hijab, but I didn’t imagine your country would allow you to actually walk into the House of Representatives wearing it. And she said she wore her hijab everywhere in the community, except when she has to represent them.

That’s my Congresswoman :-)))

Observer but this is typically awful, prominently displayed on the home page:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/dec/22/labour-leadership-contest-young-members

Young Labour members point to shift away from Corbynism

Many under-30s are keen to see a change in direction after four defeats in a row

No polling data or info on trends, sources for the story culled from responses to a Twitter request from the author’s sub-700 follower account.

Tag-line for the separate lead story’s of the day:

The election was bad, but the aftermath is worse for a divided party

🤔

'a change in direction after four defeats in a row'

which were in at least two different directions

Four elections in nine years 🤔

Alice Gent, 21, says she "strongly aligns to the left of (Labour( and its values"

... and yet ...

"I think we’ve had too many north London Liberal elite-esque leaders and (Nandy) would be a welcome change from this".

... she's from London btw.

The terms are as bad as the 'latte-drinking' BS discussed elsewhere.

Callaghan
Foot
Kinnock
Smith
Blair
Brown
Miliband
Corbyn

It's true that some of those people have lived in North London. That's partly because politics is centred in London.

Blair, Brown and Miliband all represented constituencies far from London.

Would a South London liberal elitist be OK?

Most MPs are part of an 'elite' in that they are MPs, and better paid than most UK people.

Note also that many people think JC is not 'liberal' because they foolishly think he is illiberal. Whereas actually he is quite liberal but better described as he would describe himself: a socialist.

also 'socially liberal' Blairism was very illiberal, unlike Corbyn project which literally enlisted the Liberty director who had clashed so often with Blairism's illiberalism.

Unfortunately all these words are completely meaningless and mean whatever it is people want them to mean at any given time

Yeah I was annoyed at that “story” too. There are a lot of clueless wankers reading tea leaves with unwarranted certainty and ventriloquising Northern voters they had never thought about before last Thursday; some of them are under 30.

tbf to the Observer spoke to someone from Oxford, that's about some distance north of the York Way.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/dec/22/community-union-acorn-reports-glut-of-applications

Its popularity appears to be a sign of growing appetite for non-party political action, not only as people brace for five more years of Conservative government but also as they lose faith with Labour’s ability to deliver change.

Does it?

great work lads, but you should have just supported and voted Labour instead of undermining them for 3 years and then some people might not have required charitable volunteer work to help them get the fucking basics.

Alex Sobel did a good post on this concept the other day, labour do need to reconnect to poor as fuck communities and helping them as far as they can with austerity driven problems - then at least come election time - they won't be counting on their "strong ground game".

It looks like you need to sign in to read stories now - which is possibly the push i needed to stop annoying myself.