Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

and in fact there's not one word in that whole piece offering examples of Corbyn's antisemitism

This is what happens when you seek out and interview bitter Islington Liberal Democrats still smarting that they've never recovered from being in coalition with Tories and never will.

If only they cared so much about effective opposition that they voted against The Welfare Bill rather than pouring their energy into factional ratfuckery. I'll be so glad the next time this party get's an absolute pasting in an election. I'll be just as cock-a-hoop as Jess was that night in December.

There’s a pretty consistent implication in a lot of the pieces like this that his local supporters are too poor and ignorant to pay attention to ‘real politics’ and are just taken in by his visibility and helpfulness with constituency matters, with all the racial and class implications that come with that.

"an effective opposition to the government, who can win power" is the number 1 indicator of being a soft Tory fuckwit

I don't think I'm ready to comment on this more fully because I'm seeing arguments from all directions that are making me angry but I think a lot of people are conflating the issue of whether this is being weaponised with whether it's being exaggerated, and it's important to separate the two.

There is also the flipside to the weaponisation argument which is whether a blind eye is being turned to similarly awful situations involving other minority groups but the ongoing shitshow that is British politics and British political parties is in no state to address that in the way that actually matters (ie for the victims).

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/nov/06/child-labour-doesnt-have-to-be-exploitation-it-gave-me-life-skills

This is doing the rounds this morning.

The author works for an organisation promoting crop diversification (ie. growing tobacco) in Malawi - one that receives funding from front organisations for the tobacco industry. British American Tobacco is currently being sued over the use of child labour in Malawi in a case that could potentially set a precedent for the whole industry if successful. Probably just a coincidence though.

I get the feeling most of the "positive impact solutions" stanned for by Palladium will greatly benefit child-labourers in 3rd world countries and if it works out good for evil global corporations as well then that is just an incidental benefit!

Is international concern on child rights relevant to Africa?

bit on the nose this

this kind of openly bought advertorial (which is what it is) has never been as uncommon in broadsheetland-at-large as it should be

(esp the sundays inc. the observer back to the 70s at least ffs, and ditto US versions of same)

but i don't recall it in the guardian all that often (if at all) (hence the sudden appalled fuss abt it today)?

bear in mind i don't read the guardian hardly at all -- cf my correct but embarassingly written post at the top of this thread 19 years ago! -- so i may simply have missed many earlier examples (and as i say the observer used to be infested with it and i haven't read that since the 80s when they totally fvcked me over re a regular position as music-writer lol)

All of their global development stuff is sponsored by Bill Gates’ foundation iirc.

lol i now have in my head the ghost of some super-ancient observer beef pro or con RIO TINTO ZINC which i can't access the detail of online (or indeed in my head)

shorter beef: RIO TINTO ZINC is always bad not good

You'll be blaming Tiny Rowland next for you not getting that job.

At the Eden Project there's an exhibit about how mining is good not bad for the environment, helpfully installed through support from Rio Tinto

tiny knew a lethal threat when he saw one (me writing 400 wds abt the bhundu boys)

Not Guardian but media story:

https://kotaku.com/ubisoft-to-remove-controversial-host-from-watch-dogs-le-1845596398?utm_medium=sharefromsite&utm_source=kotaku_twitter

Helen Lewis axed from ... a voiceover on a podcast about a video game?

The melts and terfs are so annoyed! Cue a lot of trans allies and left people all coming with receipts to tell about her bullying them, including one guy who said she got him shitcanned from a regular gig at a think tank because she refused to participate in an event they were working on unless he was fired.

got to admit I never had a clue she was involved with gaming podcasts. Ash Sakar also said she tried to threaten to get one of her pieces pulled from the NS. She's not only a grotesque bigot but also a bullying living embodiment of Viz's Spoilt Bastard!

The people I was thinking of include Ash.

Ubisoft used her (and dunty lol) as some of the in-game political podcasters in their Dystopian London game, then panicked when people pointed out what a dumb bigot she is - I don't think she was ever an dedicated gaming podcaster though she possibly did a podcast about how poor people don't know what coffee is at some point?

Also, when reviewing Labour’s arts policy she wrote ‘don’t encourage them, Jeremy...’

xp she tried to own actual professional gamer SonicFox and it was one of the worst things I’ve ever seen

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D5QJA1jUUAEDbup?format=jpg&name=large

SonicFox for president btw

”if only we had our own AOC in the UK”

Nice headline here from the guardian reporting on AOC basically begging the dems to all work together instead of being factional. She’d be absolutely torn to shreds if she was an MP.

I'm puzzled by Lewis's entry into the world of computer games. It's not something about which I would have expected her - or indeed Dunt - to have very deep knowledge.

politics and media are dominated by people talking vaguely authoritatively about things they have barely thought about and have little more than a passing interest in

she clearly doesn't

i'm guessing they were sourced as "representative" UK podcasters to form part of the game's ambient soundworld. as i understand it the game is set in a dystopian hellscape so this feels like good casting

if i were post-fash antifa battling the cyberforces of future evil i would simply turn off the imitation remainiacs podcast

I am going to get accused of "liking Helen Lewis" again, but 10 seconds googling suggests that she writes about them quite a bit

https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2012/11/why-are-we-still-so-bad-talking-about-video-games

(and also, we're of the age when an appreciable percentage of 'normal' people will be video game fans)

but as she admits, she is bad at talking about them

xp if the shoe fits

why dont u just marry her

I’d suggest that writing about games and knowing about games are not quite the same, and that perhaps condescending to a professional gamer about his lack of skill isn’t the best way to demonstrate it either?

tbh the exchange with the gamer meant literally nothing to me

She’s basically calling someone who’s good enough to play fighting games professionally, to the point they make a very decent living from it, a scrub lol. It’s like them dismissing her work with “I’ve scribbled out more coherent shit on my dream journal “, except their argument would have more merit.

(i was checking the Wikipedia page and realised they came out as nb last year).

Anyway, their best eplayer award speech is the best.

I'm pretty appalled that @guardian would run an obituary of a serial killer. What did he achieve that is worthy of such recognition? pic.twitter.com/fSS8QfuWdq

— Hallie Rubenhold (@HallieRubenhold) November 14, 2020

even the appalling tory rag The Yorkshire Post put his victims on the cover rather than a photo of the serial killer as a young man, like he's some kind of fucking matinee idol.

I’m fine with an obit, written by one of the best crime reporters in the world, about one of the most twisted criminals ever.

He was a significant part of the life of the country - recognition isn't an inherently positive term, nor is an obituary.

xp
well yeah, but not many elusive master crims (of the non-murdering/sex-offender ilk) are thick enough to think knicking reg-plates from Cooper Bridge Motors is how you evade the police!

very London-centric takes. I'll beg to differ.

"a significant part of the life of the country" that's one bullshit way of putting it.

looking at DC's True Crime bibliography (including a Billy Connoly biography!) none of it looks like it would stand up next Happy Like Murderers by Gordon Burn, so perhaps standards are slipping!

anyway my final take is if this grubby white van man dullard who murdered loads of women gets a full page obit, then cancel culture still has a lot of work to do.

the idea that giving someone an obituary is automatically seen as an accolade is weird to me. but I guess the guardian have muddied the waters a little by introducing this 'other lives' section where guardian readers celebrate their late family members and friends:

https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/series/otherlives

it looks like there wasn't one published this Friday, so at least they avoided printing an obituary of someone's beloved granny appearing next to Peter Sutcliffe

if one of your obscure but dead uncles or aunts got a full page obit in one of the national broadsheets, wouldn't you think such recognition was an accolade of sorts? There is already enough been written about this arsehole, probably mostly of the sensationalist style of murderer fan-fic ilk, who needs a respectable obit as well?

Hi Calzino. When seeing objectionable things on social media, it's really important to look for the context.

Not to play Captain-Save-a-Guardian (I am well aware of their failings and shortcomings) but I was reading the website throughout the day (very boring meetings) and that specific piece was about the 3rd or 4th piece down a large subsection that concentrated mostly on the victims, the survivors, the toxic police attitudes. It was a small piece to provide context, a tiny piece of their total coverage.

This has the chronology of their coverage here, which documents how the news unfolded:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/peter-sutcliffe

At the first news, there was a small piece focusing on the victims and their families, and whether his death brought them "closure". Then there was a small piece of coverage of the police's apology to the families, again centring the victims. Then there was the main story, the headline piece: an in-depth long-read on the toxic misogyny and hatred of sex workers and how and why the police bungled the investigation so badly. That was a pretty good piece, it provided a lot of context, many interviews with contemporary women, including survivors, feminist protesters, representatives from the English Collective of Prostitutes. Then, four pieces down, the obituary (which is hardly the glamourisation that Rubenhold portrays - again it focuses mostly on police incompetence). Then a final summing up of the news, which again focuses mostly on the victims.

Then today, I can see (but haven't yet read) an op-ed on whether police treatment of female victims, sex workers, has or hasn't changed (I have learned not to judge columnists' tone by the headlines or subs, which they don't write.)

Selectively taking one small piece out of a whole, and representing it as the whole story is sensationalising and shoddy practice, no matter what the topic. Maybe try to evaluate and confirm stories on social media before sharing them?

respectfully BB I still agree with tweet I shared, despite whatever else of value the Graun has done in their Sutcliffe coverage, it makes no difference to me. I grew up in genuine childhood fear that this guy might murder my mum every time she went to work on an evening, so perhaps sometimes agreeing with a sentiment expressed on social doesn't require "confirmation and evaluation" when you know how you feel about something and you know you have a extremely implacable position on it! Anyway fuck this guy and the Graun!

Even the bbc covered the misogyny towards sex workers by WYP, the Graun isn't exactly an outlier here.

That obituary reads like a crib notes version of his Wikipedia page.