Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

this is what left unity looks like

Amelia Gentleman must be looking at that Hinsliff piece and muttering WHAT THE ACTUAL...

I'm frankly overjoyed to discover the rest of the world has cottoned onto beautiful banality of Chiles' column. There's something vaguely reassuring about its workaday 2006ish awfulness in these dark times.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/jan/19/boris-johnson-liberal-nuanced-cautious?utm_term=Autofeed&CMP=twt_gu&utm_medium=&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1579423216

Liberal, nuanced, cautious - Boris Johnson - same paragraph. Checks calendar ... not April yet.

Not sure why I just read the Observer editorial on the Labour leadership race.

Labour must learn the correct lessons from the election (reasons for the defeat do not include blaming brexit or a hostile media, do include having socialist policies and criticising Tony Blair). The successful candidate will have to communicate these ‘hard truths’ to the naughty left-leaning part members. Also an irony-free mention of how the country needs social welfare and action on climate change more than free broadband.

The more openly right-wing press (all the other press) meanwhile are free to go 100mph on culture-wars filth, but tbh this is presumably reflective of what real people want to hear and is therefore the hard truth we need?

is there a plugin which can hide all the articles written by cunts on the guardian homepage? It would be genuinely very useful, I have enough sites to hateread already.

You may want to stay away from it on Sundays.

xp I use an adblocking app to hide all their money pop ups, sure you could create a similar filter to hide the shit. Though it might take you ages.

Though pom otm, the ObSeRvEr is a septic tank most weeks.

I mean:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/jan/19/boris-johnson-liberal-nuanced-cautious

Toby Belm innit

they are saying that there is nothing to see here. re: PM track record of being openly racist. and most right wing tory party since 30's maintaining hostile environment and destructive austerity from previous leader is "nuanced and liberal". Might have said the latter about the Graun 20 years ago. We are just a month into his premiership minus the Christmas break. So it is a bit fucking early to be making any bold claims about the complexion of this govt. They've barely had a chance to fuck anything up yet and he was on his hols when WW3 nearly started.

The Luanda Leaks stories are great

Guardisn has an article about how cats are ripping families and communities apart, thread title never been more rhetorical.

Curse ye for making me seek it out. Remove curse for having enjoyed the read. Curse the Graun for being worse than it used to be.

Sam Francis’s garden is constantly under attack. The assailant is an unneutered tom cat whom she has nicknamed Little Big Balls. “At first I thought he was quite cute,” says the 43-year-old arts producer from Weston-super-Mare. “Then the bullying started.” Little Big Balls is a remorseless playground thug. “He would run across the garden and just go for my cat, Moustachio. If Moustachio was outside, Little Big Balls would attack him.” Moustachio became too terrified to go outside.

We had our kittens’ brother around last night and even though he was less than a third their size, he bullied them both til he left. I empathised with that woman only! But there aren’t bad cats, only bad owners (and co-owners).

Moustachio

Moustachio is a beautiful boy, the owner is right to protect him

Reminded of one of the Marmalade books where the racehorse was called Irish Bob and was furious about the ridiculous name the humans had given him.

We won’t let Brexit come between us, and we hope you feel the same. Britain may be leaving the EU, but the Guardian remains committed to Europe. Our open, independent reporting will inform Britain about Europe, Europe about Britain, and the rest of the world about both. In these turbulent, decade-defining times, we will stay with you. We need your support to keep delivering quality journalism so we can all make up our minds based on fact, not fiction.

For as little as £1 you can support us today. Thank you. Make a contribution - The Guardian

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IN THESE DECADE-DEFINING TIMES

most important year ever

Lol imagine the cheek of that when they were constantly running Labour scare stories just marginally more respectable than the tabloids?

who the fuck actually pays that subscription is buzzfeed registered as a charitable organisation

Even bearing in mind this is a Fiona Millar opinion piece, this is breathtakingly bad and shouldn't have been published at all, let alone given the prime spot on the website.

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/feb/04/mp-new-labour-education-lucky-blair-brown

Love to see lazy hack Catherine Bennett get two pieces of shit published today: one, a legitimate concerns piece about trans people (of course!) and the second a completely embarrassing sketch piece that even Tom Prick would be ashamed of. Fuck these people, my only comfort is that the fascists won’t spare them either.

Imagine this being your hill to die on? The sheer, unvarnished cuntery of it!

”human rights do not include the right not to be offended or to have your spiritual, or other non-negotiable private convictions, affirmed by fellow citizens."

hnnggghhhh

The Tories are flirting with eugenicists and Labour is insisting biological sex is just a social construct. Britain having a totally normal one

— Hadley Freeman (@HadleyFreeman) February 17, 2020

deport her!

One has led to the death and immiseration of countless millions over the centuries, the other has caused the vein in Graham Linehan's temple to throb unattractively. Fair comment then.

well yeah on one side of parliament is an opposition party being pro trans rights and on the other side is the beginning of the T4 aktion.

you need some warped thinking to to draw a comparison here

I can see why someone who’s a massive terf and chief both-sideser would think that comparison stands up

i've got vague memories of being a regular reader of lost in showbiz over a decade ago - but i don't like to talk about it!

When linehan posted his insane transphobic bilge in the mail he was like “well the guardian wouldn’t publish it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯” & I was like, they wouldn’t?

Jewdas are otm about Transphobia/Eugenics being "two branches of the same rotten tree".

just throwing it out there but i wonder if the feminists who've adopted "biological sex" as their euphemism du jour have really thought through the implications they're inviting

Yeah this is a frequent criticism - love too be feminist by reducing myself to my biological parts and functions. Also love too be feminist by happily siding with the far right and conservative Christians who don’t think women should have rights (that’s where the money is coming from).

xp they absolutely have not, e.g.

This is what #TERFlogic does to your love life. pic.twitter.com/cmg14QPSBi

— transadvocate (@transadvocate) February 15, 2020

*consults calipers*

just clicked through to see the whole post and... jesus fucking christ

poll:
flat butts
big heads

the amount of terfy shit that comes out of the uk centre/libs/"the left" is nauseating

Yep and it’s a total UK thing

my impression - and obv someone will come in and tell me that i’m wrong - is that liberal corporate and institutional culture in the US is a lot more aware of identity constructions - just in a governance sense - than equivalents in the UK. The sort of environments in which centre left libs will expect to operate. Perhaps a requirement of handling many different types of people in their governed spaces, perhaps because of a litigious culture. In the UK I get a strong whiff of class about the whole thing - Hadley Freeman and Helen Lewis ffs.

god as series of statements that looks tenuous as hell. should have put them as a series of questions or “thorts”.

like before a US business meeting the other day part of the standard pre-meet info was that one of the participants self-identifies as “they”. i think this would still generate an eye roll in many contexts in the UK rather than just being taken in everyone’s stride as it was.

Class is definitely in the mix, alongside a privilege of "I am on the right side of progressive history how dare these kids challenge me?"

There's something about the kind of people in the UK at a certain tier of social service/NHS/NGO management that you've touched on I think Fizzles - a patrician, benevolent despot mentality usually negotiated thru class and the right kind of persona/presentation - I can't articulate this very well at the moment but I've swam it in for a lot of my working life.

Linehan is a different issue, looking back on his work he's just peeved he gets called on his hilarious homo- and trans- phobic gags, they run thru his whole career.

Gl1nner as a victim of right wing brain worms is how I break it down to an extent, though of course he was probably a willing victim

Gl1nner's done the full metamorphosis into an actual wirrum!

Gl1nn3r was always a cunt, even when he was “just” being obnoxious to people on Twitter he didn’t consider insufficiently funny or deferential or w/e. It’s just now he’s a cunt with something to amplify the self-righteousness.

I cannot for the life of me find the link to it now but there was a good documentary a few years back about the origins of the 8th amendment in Ireland - cultural conservatives spotted a niche in the law, organised internationally, manufactured consensus by constant lobbying and pressure on politicians and the No side didn’t have a response against the sheer will. Trans issues have been tried as a wedge issue time and time again and some of the same patterns now and then are at play - the class profile of the people involved, how utterly willing they were to viciously attack those opposed to them, the support from America.

I find it really interesting the reforms proposed here already exist in Ireland, and without much fuss afaict. I find it really very concerning that my mother - raised somewhere so rural that there are still dirt roads - has a far more progressive understanding than the moneyed, urban, educated British women who are the most obsessive here.

There's something about the kind of people in the UK at a certain tier of social service/NHS/NGO management that you've touched on I think Fizzles - a patrician, benevolent despot mentality usually negotiated thru class and the right kind of persona/presentation - I can't articulate this very well at the moment but I've swam it in for a lot of my working life.