Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

yeah the graun, the staff have been instructed to work from home and they are "confident" about getting tomorrow's copy ready on time.

I genuinely hope they all have a shit time of it!

xp lmao, Sonia Sodha crying and find replacing dates on one of her usual op-eds is it

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jan/01/wreckage-of-brexit-politicians-denial

Well my expectations were already low

Dark Side of the Moon LOL

do have to wonder how much he was paid to write that shit, didn't even have to drive up the M1 this time.

quiet desperation is what I feel when this dickhead is quoting DSOTM, not once but twice in one piece. It's all about brexit is it? Nothing to do with the austerity that enabled it and both main parties still being 100% committed to it. That's not a JH problem.

This year will mark the 50th anniversary of a musical masterpiece that continues to speak illuminating truths about the impossibility of the human condition, and how people from these islands tend to cope with it.

Dark Side of the Moon LOL

this year will mark the 7th anniversary of a referendum masterpiece that the losers have still learned nothing from

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jan/06/keir-starmer-tony-blair-reform-new-labour-90s

"Without the optimism that carried Labour to power in the mid-90s, the party now has no choice but to go big on reform"

Andy Beckett provides a somewhat convincing picture of the current mood. But he doesn't give any examples of the reforms and changes that Labour would actually make.

"Starmer’s policy proposals and rhetoric increasingly suggest that he would go further than New Labour in trying to change the country. He feels he has no choice."

No examples are given to substantiate this statement.

"A small but growing sense of anticipation about more competent and principled government under Starmer coexists with larger fears about the present and the immediate future."

Beckett is an intelligent, knowledgeable, I would say decent person. But he can write about a KS government being "principled". Has he looked at the things that KS has actually said and done over the last 3 years? He is not a principled person. He is a bad person.

iirc The Guardian has reported on this case but gal dem's focus on ethnicity gives it a wider scope.

https://gal-dem.com/why-black-people-in-the-uk-are-more-likely-to-be-lonely/

Hard to get through the interview, so much chaos:

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/jan/07/jack-monroe-interview

Which is also interlocked with what I see of the commentary of her actions on twitter (basically she is widely believed to be a fraud; some of the people making the accusations are pretty unhinged though). It doesn't help that she'll never log off..

My take on her is basically "not going to wade into this" but her most vocal detractors do universally look like they should really get a new hobby.

Should give her credit for being the only mainstream left twitter celeb to offer a full mea culpa to Corbyn too.

I don't trust anyone who opposed Corbyn early doors, even if they did change their mind when he was almost finished. Also I have a very low opinion of her dietary advice and without ever getting involved in the tedious pile-ons I tend to see her as a grifter and that "money-saving expert" can go fuck himself as well!

yeah not a fan of professional charitarians or grifters in general but i wouldn't be picking them as a target worth more than a minor zing

and i'm sorry but this is how it works: as soon as you start bragging about gladhanding with big business then you're out of the Left, i don't make the rules

I found what I loved, which is whisky

feeling this tho

Not sure Martin Lewis would be offered a 'bathtub full of pennies' photoshoot but no idea if this is good or bad.

"as soon as you start bragging about gladhanding with big business then you're out of the Left"

and there is nothing unreasonable about this rule at all, it requires zero explanation/justification

At the beginning of her career she got properly hosed by an agent and lost thousands. All of the posters who make it their business to sift through her bins etc are also bitching her up on sites like tattle.life (which if you haven’t glanced at it, is a fucking cesspit full of people who dO tHeiR rEsEaRcH about people in the public eye in the same way as all the other idiots who’ve gone down internet wormholes always do). A lot of terfy tabloid journos HATE her in a totemic, Meghan Markle way so if it’s boiling their piss, I hope she can sort herself out.

I appreciate that she is as much of a total mess as me, and I would absolutely fuck things up in a similar way if I got famous for some reason, so attacks on her for this just make me think about the pile of letters I can't deal with and my inability to log into online banking without having a panic attack, and all of the people I thought I quite liked online who would presumably line up to condemn me for being shit or a "grifter" or w/e if they found out.

and obviously there is a continuum of people in the public eye from worst to best, JM would certainly be somewhere on the better side of the line, but if we are designating the proportion who can "fuck right off," I appreciate that posters here will vary from saying "the worst 30%" to "the worst 95%", and that seems basically fair enough, idk.

obviously two things i would never, ever criticize somebody else for are having a mess of a life and addiction issues

"I hope she can sort herself out."

Yes, this.

i know this is a thread to diss and bitch re G, but this was good.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/jan/07/ways-to-talk-to-people-grieving-cariad-lloyd-griefcast

I hope she can sort her issues and also pay back the money that she stole from people -- some of whom might have been giving what they could spare? -- because it sounds like that is what's happened xp

Doing that photoshoot is fucked up to me.

Yes, that was, er, weird. I suppose she has a book to sell but I don't know why the Guardian thought that would be a good idea.

I used to get told as a kid: don't put pennies in your mouth, they use them to cover the eyes of corpses in the hospital morgues. Not just a terrible concept, but very unhygienic as well!

so's sticking a rolled-up tenner up your nose but hey

I would guess that it's an attempt to 'reset' - people think she's swimming in money Scrooge McDuck-style, but a bathtub of pennies is closer to the truth, is the message.

I think pinching off people who might be vulnerable then swimming in a bathtub full of pennies is a bit of a problem.

to be clear here the "stealing from vulnerable people" is "not providing higher-tier patreon rewards in time when she was having an addiction crisis, though she's up to date with them now"?

I think the combo of giving lousy nutritional advice, being a melt and grifting cash from some of her constituency who might not be so clued up and might be poor is a pretty fucking shoddy excuse of a career to build tbh. I have zero respect for her.

to be clear here the "stealing from vulnerable people" is "not providing higher-tier patreon rewards in time when she was having an addiction crisis, though she's up to date with them now"?

lol wait is this truly the story? We need to up our standards for what constitutes a grift if so.

how much will that cost me?

Really we should just kill off Patreon

I mean I would probably be bankrupt without it but yeah go off

THere is a Metallophagia specifically dedicated to coins isn't there?
JUst prompted to that thought by a comment above

I sucked a lot of pennies as a kid and I still crave the taste sometimes, it's like blood

they are quite delicious if you microwave them with supermarket brand spaghetti hoops!

After many months of reading Philippa Perry’s agony column, I am beginning to conclude she is unfortunately as superficial as previous incumbent Mariella Frostrup:

(From today’s advice)

Don’t waste another day of not relishing just how fabulous you are. You may not feel confident, but act it, get used to it. You can fake it to make it, and so can I – thanks for the reminder.

Not so much a "I hate The Guardian" as "the sad state of journalism today" but I've been fascinated with Peru lately. A while back I did the whole "move the little figure over Google Maps and look at places picked at random" over Peru, and it's a famously good-looking country. You're alright, Peru! I'd love to hire a scooter and just drive around Peru, spending money here and there in little villages, bringing good cheer to the locals and handing out photographs of Rene Coty.

But a few days later the former President - or actual President at the time - was impeached. But before the vote happened he suspended the government. Thankfully the rule of law stepped in and he was arrested, but Peru has been deadlocked with protests since then. The parallels with events in the United States a couple of years are obvious but Peru seems to have managed thinks much better. Some tourists were stuck on Machu Picchu! How horrible.

You'd think The Guardian would be all over it, but it seems they only have one reporter covering the entire country - a chap called Dan Collyns:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/peru

But he's stuck in a hotel in Lima, and his pieces are just rewrites of Associated Press articles. As far as I can tell the paper hasn't run a single editorial column about it, not a single opinion piece, except this, and even then it's a general state-of-left-wingers-in-South-America piece:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/dec/30/the-guardian-view-on-latin-americas-left-leaders-pink-tide-could-lift-all-boats

Obviously Peru is on the far side of the world, and so far no British people have been killed, and every other newspaper has the same problem, but the lack of coverage is striking. And it's unlikely that this will explode into nuclear war or even regional war etc. The Guardian and other newspapers have ample space for drivel about toilet rolls and the awful sacrifices involved in working from home with a baby, the columnist's trips to B&Q etc, but not Peru.

Given that the newspaper is currently being hit with a ransomware attack it makes a certain amount of sense that it would be prioritising lightweight puff-pieces, but still. I was struck by this, which is (a) less entertaining than my own posts here at Ilxor (b) I can't understand what the writer is getting at (c) is there space in 2023 for a column that mocks the word "leverage":
https://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/commentisfree/2023/jan/08/may-i-have-a-word-about-adobes-creative-use-of-language

I think that's what offends me most. Not only could I do a better job than these people, I *am* doing a better job. So are you! I have written better emails than that column, and so have you, probably.

I think pretty much all British newspapers have cut back heavily on foreign correspondents in recent years as circulation has declined. Maybe the solution is to ship Adrian Chiles out to Peru and get him to file reports about the political situation there in addition to his articles about button flies vs zip flies etc

Lol

Dear @cityjournalism, thanks for asking me to come and lecture your students year after year about journalism (for free), and then lecturing me on social media about my lack of journalistic ethics via @jopayton after my interview with @BootstrapCook.

— Simon Hattenstone (@shattenstone) January 8, 2023

very classy to @ her employer in and threaten to withdraw his riveting lectures, what a guy

Oh, the 2021 census results are out, oh here's an article about being gay in the straightest town in the UK, should be interesting

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jan/09/gay-straightest-town-england-wales-rochford

oh

James Cottis is a Conservative district councillor and property investor

In regards to Peru I don't think Guardian coverage of Latin America (besides Brazil or Argentina) would ever be much to shout about?

Frankly I'd want re-written bland news agency pieces which outlines this or that happened rather than a poor Western Liberal putting their spin on the goings on in that part of the world.