Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

no. and the most egregious thing in the article, and i cant pinpoint if this is coming from the director or writer as the director's comment is more ambigusous, is the suggestion that landlords had strong ties to the land and the irish people. 50% of irish land during the famine was owned by people who had barely or never even set foot in the country!

I would be interested to know what sources he has that challenge the conventional accounts of tenant landlord relations in ireland during the famine, because the director and the writer both seem to have _some_ information

Maybe he just thought the lads claiming the rents from London has Irish sounding names

he's probably read one of Tristram Hunt's book about the Empire maybe?

xp

Boinedan O'Neill

Fuck me my blood pressure must be through the roof after reading that

This guy ssems to know less about Irish history than a Secretary of State for Northern Ireland.

My dad came from Londonkerry so as a certified Irish expert I can safely that ain't possible!

The British, a great bunch of lads.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ErVZpVjXcAEmFir?format=jpg&name=medium

lol

for context he's complaining and talking about a new holocaust memorial in London and the inherent dangers of lessons from the past, more one for the fascist columnists thread but here you have it:

More likely the focus will be on how Britain did not let in enough Jewish refugees in the 1930s. And since no one likes an unhappy ending, it will stress how we have made up for this in the years since by taking in millions of economic migrants from across the third world — something which we must obviously continue to do.

Oh so a Nazi

Who, Douglas Murray? Horrible man.

I like that it features a pic of Dan Snow looking even smugger and more loathsome than he has ever looked, lol the power of nazi culture wars!

re the Famine:

I think there ought to be a way between 'moustache-twirling villains' and presenting the UK state favourably.

You could present the UK state very unfavourably while avoiding clichés that don't work dramatically. You could even show some individual Britons quite favourably while still being utterly critical of UK state policy.

So the director bloke has set up a false binary which isn't helpful re: thinking about how best to narrate the Famine (or rather Famines) today.

I know this is your thing, but seriously, fuck off.

moustache-twirling villains really has no meaning if administrators of empire don't qualify

why would you need to show britons favourably

"You could even show some individual Britons quite favourably while still being utterly critical of UK state policy."

See what you're saying but most films with a good guy amongst a mess created by the system they are operating under have been mostly bad not good.

I think after the deluge of feature films about the famine that depicted the British in a bad light the time had come had obviously for a more balanced approach.

the Imperial Westminster Government's cold indifference and preference for protecting free market interests rather than saving millions of lives in their colonies is such ripe territory for making a feelgood lib movie about a good guy trying his best to make a difference in a damned rotten system, lol!

Charles Wood, 1st Viscount of Halifax and chancellor of the exchequer, was one of the ultimate Westminster bad guys during the famine according to the In Our Time from the other year.

Better:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jan/10/covid-pop-culture-notalgia-new-crisis-recycle

The Guardian pick for the comments however is bad not good

Guardian comments are always total dogshit, just old dads moaning that it’s nOt ReAl MuSiC and shit like that. I really enjoyed the piece, forward-looking and even a bit optimistic but very grounded in the harsh reality of the present, and really delightful to read.

also i chose to include myself in the concept of the “bolshie millennial”, lol, but also it made me think about my own consumption during the pandemic and keenness to rely on rereads and favourite artists etc... something something new can’t be born, etc. Very thoughtful piece.

lol one of the senile dad comments: the stones, THE B******, coldplay, bowie ...bring back the 65 special steam train with Jimmy Savile driving it .. good reminder not to read the comments section!

“militantly online and always pranking”

:D

that whole para is so good and on the money

Guardian comments are always total dogshit, just old dads moaning that it’s nOt ReAl MuSiC and shit like that. I really enjoyed the piece, forward-looking and even a bit optimistic but very grounded in the harsh reality of the present, and really delightful to read.

― scampish inquisition (gyac), Sunday, 10 January 2021 16:35 (fourteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

randomly beefing with x factor of all things lol it's 2020 you unfrozen caveman mfer

THEY DON’T PLAY INSTRUMENTS

the thing that resonated with me was the algorhithmic effect of connecting me to a glut of the old. i spent about six months collecting less known 70s female singer songwriters that the spotify algo kept feeding me before i got sick to death of them and YEARNED for something else. the music i've been listening to in the last few months has felt really like just so many new worlds and it took the stultifying dreariness of spotify monotony to push me into new waters. felt a little bit like how exciting it was when broadband first meant i could download things and i could finally hear what like CAN and frankie knuckles and lamonte young sounded like after only having like the couple of "alternative" shows on irish radio for my teens. I remember just being obsessed with ubuweb!

I got a bit sick of spotify pushing me into the culdesac of "these are the six flavours of music you listen to" (not that it's inaccurate, I think I would have spent a big chunk of last year listening to ecm stuff even without the algo feedback loop) and decided to listen to stuff on my computer for a while - the most recent thing on there being a (very good!) funk comp I dled in 2016 compiled by ilxor oor neechy

I'm just the senile dad from comments section but you replace coldplay, the b*****s and stones with carla bley, spontaneous music ensemble and thelonious monk

no honestly there was a point where spotify was only recommending things by people who had collaborated with the mcgarrigles at some point. this is when i stopped subscribing to spotify.

I would never betray my lifelong love slsk by subscribing to some corporate legal streaming service ... Never!

yah yr right, slsk is just infinitely better

Hooray this was good the comments were funny and illustrate something I can't quite focus, that there's The New as facet of the discourse but there's always an ongoing personal New made of slices of the old which we're all free to construct or not construct every day, I can see which choice Graun commenters make

I dunno I've been watching a lot of Columbo lately

No idea who this M4rk S1nk3r fellow is, but that was a very good piece. It made me double check whether today really is Sunday.

I don't know what day it is but I think it might be a leap year now there is some good music writing in the graun.

The Mark S article is well written, and I agree that, in some sense, there is creativity in small-scale 'pranking' internet activity - memes, videos, jokes, etc.

It's less clear to me what the article proposes about the future of pop music.

The article correctly talks about the economic fallout of the pandemic - loss of live revenues, etc.

But what does that imply aesthetically? Why would we think that the pandemic would have any great aesthetic consequence at all?

If you love, say, folk music, then doubtless you've carried on playing, and listening to, folk music, and will do even if one day this terrible pandemic is over.

Same for any other genre: country, heavy metal, house music.

So I don't think I see how the pandemic has presented any interesting shift in the future of pop, apart from the purely negative effect it's had in making some poor musicians poorer.

Zoe Williams has a page today talking about how she is no longer making lockdown resolutions, or any resolutions.

was amused by this clumsy paragraph from a news item earlier today:

"More than half a million people over the age of 80 are to receive letters inviting them to attend one of seven large coronavirus vaccination centres opening in England, where they will be able to book an appointment online or over the phone."

It was a good Mark S article. Perhaps unfairly, it did feel to me at the end that he felt self-pressured that he ought to say something prophetic about possible future.

I couldn’t quite understand that last bit (mea culpa), but there’s always a risk with prophecy that you do something like Parsons/Burchill’s championing of Tom Robinson as the next great hope.

It makes you think.

Yes, lots of the Capitol mob yesterday looked stupid in their fur vests etc: but don't confuse that with "not dangerous".

Trolling and ridiculousness are a hallmark of extremist ideology; it's what stops people realising the threat until it's too late. https://t.co/zBEdilcIsm pic.twitter.com/6KPiIBDGe9

— Helen Lewis (@helenlewis) January 7, 2021

She knows whereof she speaks

I really like the comments under Allan Jenkins' gardening column. They seem warm and interested.

after an alarming dip earlier in the week, this is a very good piece

john ganz goes by @lioneltrolling and his tweets are good not bad

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/commentisfree/2021/jan/14/what-have-we-learned-from-trumps-reign-there-are-worse-things-than-being-boring

Chiles is back.

And the silencing of Suzanne Moore continues with a new weekly column in the Telegraph

the Torygraph will give a column to any old riff-raff these days