Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

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.

On desktop, at least. I can continue to annoy myself on mobile devices for the moment.

If you just press “not now” on desktop you can just continue reading.

Rats!

In a world of online everything, a real #PeriodOfReflection could benefit us all
John Harris

yes indeed John. People should spend more time away from wireless broadband and garbage opinion pieces by garbage people.

They are experimenting though so let's be hopeful! xp

i might be saying the obvious here, but isn't north london liberal elite considered dog whistle antisemitism?

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

― Srinivasaraghavan VONCataraghavan (ShariVari), Monday, 23 December 2019 08:41 (fifty-six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

On desktop, at least. I can continue to annoy myself on mobile devices for the moment.

― Srinivasaraghavan VONCataraghavan (ShariVari), Monday, 23 December 2019 08:47 (forty-nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

If you just press “not now” on desktop you can just continue reading.

― glindr jackson (gyac), Monday, 23 December 2019 08:51 (forty-five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Rats!

― Srinivasaraghavan VONCataraghavan (ShariVari), Monday, 23 December 2019 08:58 (thirty-nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

lol I had this exact journey yesterday

You have read 88 articles in the last two months. More people, like you, are reading and supporting the Guardian’s independent, investigative journalism than ever before...

at least they help you gauge how appalling your online media reading habits have become these days.. sheeit need to stop giving them so many clicks.

yeah i was shocked when it quoted me 90 the other day but i had a #PeriodOfReflection and decided i wouldn't have paid for any of them

It's sad, the thing they once were good for was investigative journalism but they have really stepped that down in recent years (I guess as they became MI5's comms office)

I think the web version is significantly worse than the paper because of the prominence it gives to puff (those live blogs and comment pieces particularly)

yeah i miss having a newspaper tbh, this is a really good example of the web as a backward technological step

i might be saying the obvious here, but isn't north london liberal elite considered dog whistle antisemitism?

"as they became MI5's comms office"

a lot of people seem incapable of grasping this development at the Graun. I causally dropped it in a conversation with some middle class gammon type in a pub and got scolded talking "absolute bollocks"!

Speaking of, I saw awful aristocrat Marina Hyde randomly deciding to have a go at Aaron Bastani on twitter yesterday. How singularly awful do you have to be to make me feel bad for Aaron fucking Bastani? Also, I just learned that she had a thing with Piers Morgan, how does she manage to pass as a liberal darling again?

Because nothing means anything

her and Brooker should be liquidated in the first wave of terror.. gulags are too good for 'em!

speaking of gulags


https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/dec/23/the-expats-dilemma-i-want-my-child-to-grow-up-in-australia-but-i-didnt-want-to-come-home

You just now learned Marina Hyde has poor judgement re: Piers Morgan? It wasn’t just a drunken mistake either, and it was around the time she worked for the Sun. Yep, someone who doesn’t strictly need to earn/work (she lives in South Ken and you don’t buy there on a Graun salary) thought ‘oh, I’ll begin my career at the shittiest tabloid’.

She is now married to someone quite high up in the BBC, fwiw.

Legit just discussing this with one of my Aussie friends. Had some choice words about this piece, in particular this risible bit:

I loathed the driving, the bland strawberries, my daughter’s all-white kindergarten, speaking my own language.

People on phone lines helped, waiters were kind, our nostril hairs grew back.

I mean, you could cut back on the coke in Paris too.

To the greater world, Australia has an unwavering magical quality; people’s eyes dance, they see koalas cuddling people riding kangaroos in the twinkling outback sea. They’ll never come – it’s what, an eight-hour flight? So the dream grows and mutates, the land of endless summers and calm and beauty, where everyone has a backyard (even in the city!) and everyone is happy.

What? This woman is delusional. When I think of Australia I think of snakes, spiders, chundering drunks, and prematurely wrinkled squinting racists and homophobes.

i can't read that piece, i'm trying to get my christmas goodwill head on

I would advise against it. Not that I managed the whole thing.

I like how she says her daughter’s kindergarten was all white. As though that wasn’t a reflection of the area she chose to live in! Guarantee she only socialised with white people in Paris.

^^ "We moved back to North Melbourne and found some of our pathetic friends from 12 years before had moved to the suburbs to be close to their parents. The sad losers! So we moved to a seaside town of Victorian infrastructure (the era not the state) seven hours away to be near my parents, and somehow lots of ppl in town there were white and you needed a car to get around? This is definitely the fault of the country, not us."

Water you could drink from the tap.

motherfucker we have great water here