Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

she's just no Chilesy

I know her a little, but that doesn’t change the pantsness of the column today.

Just saw that, as per comments earlier about the Guardian always running "drink less" columns, Adrian Chiles has written a whole book about same.
https://storage.googleapis.com/circlesoft/document/photos/003/787/355/original_9781788163590.jpg?1663134367

Predictable but still astounding reponses
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/feb/21/do-not-forget-jeremy-corbyn-failure-on-antisemitism

People online rightly hating the headline.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/mar/07/conservatives-channel-crossings-small-boats-tories-rwanda-deportation

"Unworkable" being the harshest criticism the Labour Party can muster.

There are ppl in Lab HQ looking at that and saying "we'll do better".

lost count of the amount of times I hear how the tories need to "get a grip" from the shadow cabinet's "big guns". So yeah, mainly all of their most destructive and evil policies are fine in principle, but they just aren't getting a grip on them.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/10/russell-brand-politics-public-figures-responsibility

How naive do you have to be to have not realised Brand was always an egocentric twat? His current trajectory is vmic so give it a rest with all the hand-wringing.

He has, in this respect, become the opposite of what he was.

Not really!

Stopped reading after "I once admired Russell Brand".

does "energising young people who had been alienated from politics" include that toe-curling interview in Ed's kitchen? Blimey George, if only you were as easily impressed during the Corbyn era.

Corbyn completely ended this cunt's grift on the left, a worthy achievement in itself

He's been telling on himself for years and the thing with him refusing to continue a film shoot until a wardrobe assistant took her top off for him was reported in like 2012 ffs

Jeez some of you need to exit the vampire castle

I like Bananaman's point. Until 2015 Brand (whom I have always hated in general) could actually appear as a radical outside voice from the Left. Even Miliband (whom I have always mostly liked) was 'the Left' in a way. JC changed that.

From “good enough” to “good”.

piece from mark sweney suggesting that lineker's refusal to apologise and back down is brand positioning. god knows lineker's a melt at times, but the idea someone might have convictions is an alien concept to these people

They really, really suck.

Guardian columnists inserting "to be sure" grafs about how this was sort of Lineker's fault captures so much pic.twitter.com/RNCGMjsw9Z

— Michael Caley (@MC_of_A) March 11, 2023

it's been a banner week for fans of nuanced fascism

Better to explain and use detail...on Twitter

Guardian writers would be better off highlighting reports challenging the myth of Britain's 'generosity' in the 30s and 40s
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/28/the-uks-response-to-refugee-children-in-1945-and-now

xp total accident they used the term National Socialist as well in case any lib feeling uncomfortable about their part in all this forgot how close the UK came to actual real fascism in the 2019 election

Liam Hogan, btw, has written more incisive critiques of fascism past and present on Twitter than the Graun & Observer both have managed in years of publication.

|￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣|
It benefits the far-right
if Nazi Germany is viewed
as an anomalous outlier
rather than an
ethno-nationalist model
|＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿|
(\__/) ||
(•ㅅ•) ||
/ 　 づ#HistorianSignBunny

— Liam Hogan (@Limerick1914) July 14, 2018

good stuff

one of the many, many pieces of evidence i will cite when we gulag every last fucking melt is that Lineker's tweet was very carefully worded, deliberately or not, and didn't in fact say any of the stuff that the commentariat has been knocking him for

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/21/i-learned-a-lot-from-making-kimchi-about-fermented-shrimp-and-about-myself

I learned a lot from making kimchi – about fermented shrimp, and about myself

and you can go free swimming to catch shrimp!

Something very funny about this headline making him sound like a free speech basement dweller when the videos are actually thoroughly lovely and just half an hour of him waxing lyrical about the music he loves. pic.twitter.com/gyDTSPiHeJ

— Nick Reilly (@NickJWReilly) March 19, 2023

https://www.theguardian.com/food/2023/mar/23/youve-never-eaten-a-banana-10-writers-face-their-fiercest-and-strangest-food-fears

Very long set of articles on food.

Taste's very strange!

Always hated articles where the journalist goes and does something purely in order to write about it, esp. if accompanied by a photo of said journo pulling a face.

You mean like John Harris interviewing working class people to see how much they hate Jeremy Corbyn?

Imagine this being your personality.

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/df4b7b345c7dceca04aeb27192a8ae627f2f9acd/0_0_2560_1536/master/2560.jpg?width=965&quality=45&dpr=2&s=none

Tim fucking Dowling was always doing this and his shtick is already annoying enough

Except that time someone from a music magazine (Q? Mojo? Uncut?) spent three days sitting in a pub recording everything anyone played on the jukebox and went slowly mad from all the times people played 'Stairway to Heaven', which remains classic.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/apr/04/carol-vorderman-60s-renaissance-political-hero

Uncool liberal beliefs.

But if she doesn’t have power, a woman like Vorderman undeniably does wield influence

This is undeniably utter tosh.

she wields influence in the "constantly trying to sucker people into taking on debt" community

this is one of those idiot "fantasy cabinet featuring Richard Osman, Gary Lineker etc" tweets except Gaby got paid for it

to get onto the Countdown crew requires MI5 vetting, no commies allowed!

Might be remembering this wrong but pretty certain she was pretty close to calling for a mass anti-paedo vigilante movement in the tabloids around the turn of the millennium.

— Samplo Corvodina (@TreborRhurbarb) April 4, 2023

maybe they don't allow comments on obituaries as a matter of course and made a mistake here, but I and three other people left comments about nigel lawson's climate denialism. they were all deleted and comments now disabled.

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2023/apr/08/the-indian-premier-league-is-a-brilliant-thing-but-is-killing-test-cricket

"What we have here is managed decline, Test cricket treated like the block of flats the local council allows to decay until finally it has all the excuses it needs to cut its losses and pull the whole thing down."

This analogy is so melty and doesn't work. Really hate him.

IPL and Tests have coincided perfectly, even symbiotically. 50-over stuff is the victim, if there is one. The Hundred is far more pernicious an attempt to shift the game's emphases

I suppose you could make an argument that the perma-calendar of different nations' Premier Leagues is getting a bit much, but if anything they're diluting each others' brands, especially when they overlap. Test players are still playing Tests

Test cricket is going down if that schedule is anything to go by. The reason is that the shorter forms (beginning with 50) have been the more popular form of it in the sub-continent for a long time. People have not been turning up for tests over there in any kind of numbers. And there would've been more money going into Tests if that was the case.

It's hardly like Labour and Tories combining to destroy council stock.

had this convo the other day, i can see less Tests and fewer Test nations in the future but i don't see any sensible fix to reverse that

That illustration is pretty suspect, the GIANT INDIAN MAN IN HIS COLOURFUL CLOTHES is dwarfing the quiet pale English cricketer in his traditional whites

I guess a problem is length of Test series. You're lucky to get 3 in a series most of the time now, unless it's between the Big Three

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/apr/09/sunday-with-kelly-jones-head-to-the-park-to-run-the-kids-out-then-pick-up-a-chicken

Rocker Kelly Jones describes a typical Sunday.

meat and potatoes, oh the irony

even Shakin' Stevens was never that dull