Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

How much is everyone willing to bet that [noted sex pest] was the writer of that piece?

Probably not much unless they know who that is.

Bananaman Begins is right: this is a kind of publication of opinion from HF - it's giving her airtime. And if HF wrote a private (?) letter to the editor then she shouldn't have leaked it. Not appropriate.

Private Eye share the same kinds of politics with HF (though they come from a different angle).

And she would've been at home in The Observer though that publication has so many transphobes I guess they didn't have any room for her.

xxp lol remember the time when Hislop thought Angus Deayton's sex scandals made him a unfit host of Have I Got News For You

editorially PE's stance on matters cultural-political has always been pissy-prissy-reactionary -- which tbh is kind of normal for the type of magazine it is, which is that it survives and thrives by supplying ruling media-class back-channel gossip to the ruling media-class, including gobbets and glimpses of information speculation spite and beef that the self-importantly serious MSM omertà always edits out (to keep itself looking self-importantly serious)

sometimes this will be fun for the peons and more often it will be enraging; and very very VERY occasionally such as magazine will be run by someone on the actual real left (claud cockburn's the week is probably the best example: everyone knew he was a full-on communist but his sources were so good that the entire establishment subscribed, bcz it was the only way they knew what was going on)

meanwhile, as with all journalism since the beginning of time, the drives at work include nosiness and schadenfreude and mischief-making: an *entirely* principled investigative journalist will almost certainly be a p bad journalist, bcz at some point part of the job will entail betraying someone who helped you get a story (and if you spike the story for this reason you may be a good person but yr letting down yr readers)

i'm not sure if PE is actually worse since the advent of the internet -- which is a massive leak machine -- or if it comes across as worse by comparison; it doesn't help that its senior figures have been in place for 40+ years lol

cf also i.f.stone's weekly

Wheen is stepping down, and surely The Octopus's days there are numbered, maybe this will lead to some improvement.

My comments here don't relate to PE's politics as such (which might be awful or not), more just to the poor journalistic ethics of leaking a private letter to be published somewhere as another vent for your own tendentious opinions. As far as I can see, in a formal, procedural sense it stinks, leaving aside the content of HF and PE's views.

chiles is a far better columnist than hf in any case.

sneering at chiles while acting under the assumption that people revere the columns of HF is uh not well-judged

Chiles' columns are all elaborate acrostics concealing dangerous revolutionary sentiments MI5 won't let Kath Viner print iirc

Good tweet.

Listen: Zoe Williams has come unstuck in time. pic.twitter.com/4BJtTaVEiu

— Elvis Buñuelo (@Mr_Considerate) November 10, 2022

There is now a mentality – popular in some progressive circles – that to give someone “a platform” (ie, interview them) means you endorse them. But this is only true if you write puff piece interviews, whereas I like to have what Mrs Merton used to call “a heated debate”, or what I call a conversation.

hadley freeman in her last piece being so disingenuous it's not funny.

quoting a comedy persona to vindicate your bigotry and the both-siding style of hack journalism is it?

Freeman can go have a heated debate in the bin.

Well, she’s going to the Times: same thing.

What attracted you to the millionaire Rupert Murdoch

I never watched Mrs Merton much at the time, but wasn't there sort of an unfiltered bigot playing for laughs element to her character?

No cos she very explicitly insulted bigots, see eg the Bernard Manning interview. Her character was waspish and blunt but not bigoted

The truly strange thing about soccer writer Jonathan Liew is that his writing is a pastiche of Barney Ronay.

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2022/nov/26/blandest-of-displays-proves-england-are-still-far-from-top-of-the-food-chain

This could be Ronay, word for word. Liew must know this. Ronay must know this. And yet they work for the same newspaper.

If I imagine turning up for work and performing a specialised task in exactly the way that another colleague was well known for doing, in front of that colleague - the idea seems excruciatingly embarrassing.

And yet I get the impression that Ronay actually approves of the fact that he has a colleague who has copied his quite distinctive manner, down to the smallest rhythms and phrasings.

Separately: why does Liew state that ENG vs USA was 'fey'? If there is one thing it was not, that is ... 'fey'.

i don’t think he knows what that word means tbh.

he was quite good on cricket before he joined the guardian, and maybe after he joined too; i’m not an assiduous reader. i found out the other week that a close colleague lived with him for a while. “abrasive, but not in a bad way” was the summary.

Funnily enough he is really good on trans rights.

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2022/jun/28/nadine-dorries-offers-the-illusion-of-easy-choices-while-trans-athletes-pay-the-price

assume he'll be sacked soon then

That Amelia Gentleman article about transitioning teens, arrrrrrgh.

That Amelia Gentleman article about transitioning teens, arrrrrrgh.

fey (adj.): https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=fey

"of excitement that presages death," from Old English fæge "doomed to die, fated, destined," also "timid, feeble;" and/or from Old Norse feigr, both from Proto-Germanic *faigjo- (source also of Old Saxon fegi, Old Frisian fai, Middle Dutch vege, Middle High German veige "doomed," also "timid," German feige "cowardly"), from the same source as foe. Preserved in Scottish. Sense of "displaying unearthly qualities" and "disordered in the mind (like one about to die)" led to modern ironic sense of "affected"

i didnt watch the match so i wouldnt know either way, but hats off to him if he was going for "of excitement that presages death (feeble, cowardly)"

relevant modern-ish books he *might* have picked up this past-tiems usage from lol:

https://cdn.ecommercedns.uk/files/4/211944/3/11569543/8819-7.jpg

wasn't that recently mentioned in the authors no-one thread? (yes it was)

yes but im very old

Credit to Mark S - that is a strong etymological statement which could possibly actually make sense of Liew's use of the word.

At best, then, Liew was perhaps saying the match was deathly dull?

Conceivable that he was. Otherwise he was just misusing a word for alliteration's sake.

i chased this up bcz i had a v dim memory of encountering an unexpected meaning at some long-ago point, a memory i couldn't quite pin down (probably bcz at the time i'd interpreted it from context, not from knowledge: knowledge being i guess the "modern ironic sense of affected", as it says above, with a strand too of "fairylike" viz "fay")

tolkien uses it of fëanor apparently but eddison uses it (more translateably) of king gorice xi, as being driven towards death by presentiments of death, and making aggressively dangerous political and military choices accordingly

had liew a similar memory? i have no idea (and i i guess i think error is more likely, though i'm interested in what the sub-editor processing the sentence was thinking)

I'm sticking with the misusing the word theory.

at the time i think i guess-translated it roughly as "fierce to the point of wild recklessness" -- which is a long way from timid or dull

England and Wales play out eldritch, fell bore draw -- Barney Ronay, Guardian, 28.11.2022

would watch

liew is probably my favourite sports journalist, although I am also partial to jonathon wilson parodying himself.

i think my comprehension of fey may be slightly out of date itself. my only understanding was a feeling of elation/fairylike deception as a prelude to disaster and death. certainly not 'affected'. 'you're not going fey on me are you George?' (from TTSS). it meaning 'affected' is tedious: affected how?

What's TTSS?

"a feeling of elation/fairylike deception as a prelude to disaster and death"

That still doesn't seem to describe ENG 0-0 USA very well. Not much elation, at least for ENG.

no i agree. i’m with tom d. just think he misused. and apologies pf - tinker tailor soldier spy. it’s uttered by pompous civil servant Oliver Lacon, when George Smiley first starts putting his paranoic seeming theories forward.

etymonline does its best to insist that fey and fay are distinct words w/difft roots (the first germanic the second romance) and that the "fairylike" element derives from and appends only to the latter -- but evidently they've p much fused in sense these days, ftb now sounding identical

(were they pronounced differently in like the 14th century? i do not know)

my new theory is that lacon is also misusing the word, entirely bcz i dislike the character

i mix up fey and fay, and the combined word in my head has always had fairyland connotations in that sense of fairies as dangerous and not to be trusted and beguiling unto death

Lud-in-the-Mist to thread.

what does ftb mean?

I didn't really know that these were in fact two different words.

'Morgan Le Fay' (a masculine looking name for a woman character if I have remembered it correctly?) is perhaps many people's encounter with it - and suggests fairies and danger I think.

Interesting that John le Carré had the word in mind and thought he knew what he meant by it. le Carré was quite precise with words, I would say.

ftb means because

Why?

i don't know: it's old internet slang that popped out of my head and into the post without me catching and reworking it into grown-up english

it's short for "for the because"

https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/facebook/000/024/027/blog_image_3822_4926_Webcomic_Name_April_Fools_Day_201703231756.jpg

Have to hand it to Liew - here he is basically correct about a big, dreadful development, which I can discern even as the same old TV and radio consumer I've always been.

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2022/nov/28/world-cup-technology-fans-qatar-2022