alt.guardian.die.die.die

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

Ugh. The article seems to believe disagreeing with a woman is as bad as hitting her. Learning the difference between reasonable criticism and outright abuse (whether as critic or criticised) is an essential part of civic society, and something you'd expect a Guardian writer to know.

Guardian writers have been going through an experience  that they have never been through before. A large organised contingent of readers who are able to contact them and criticise them, expressing in a forthright but usually articulate manner the problems with their sociopathy, their white middle class clique and the spincycle of shit opinions they churn out to maintain their place.

When ordinary people on twitter call out the detached behaviour of women blue tickers, the reaction is notably consistent. The first line of defence is normally to check if the criticism is coming from a man . If so, they play the man, not the ball, and call them hateful misogynists (who unlike the blue tickers tweeting from their chaise lounge, are definitely tweeting from a stained wankpit). This then diverts the discussion from the shitearsed rubbish blue tick cunt is coming out with to the dynamic of a playground where outsiders from the discussion rush to pile on to defend the supposedly weaker (yet practically speaking, enormously more powerful) woman without taking even a moment to read what it's all been about. This really isn't a moment of triumphalism but a cheap way of latching onto a moral highground. It's one of the great many things about Twitter that makes it so awful.

[Buelligan]

It's also one of the many things about living in a world completely riddled with built-in privilege and prejudice that skews the pitch for everyone (almost everyone).  And we do.  Women and other minorities have been and are, routinely shouted down purely because they say something the shouter disagrees with, they're identified as belonging to the minority and summarily bawled at and degraded on that basis or cold-shouldered, until they fuck off. 

It works both ways and good-hearted people, in all groups, are hoodwinked into joining pile-ons simply because of conditioning.  All worth keeping in mind, that.  This is not confined to twitter.

[monkfromhavana]

I see John Harris' latest idea to help the destitute. Guarantee a jobless family of 4 £10,000 pounds a year to live on.

[BlodwynPig]

Guardian writers have been going through an experience  that they have never been through before. A large organised contingent of readers who are able to contact them and criticise them, expressing in a forthright but usually articulate manner the problems with their sociopathy, their white middle class clique and the spincycle of shit opinions they churn out to maintain their place.

When ordinary people on twitter call out the detached behaviour of women blue tickers, the reaction is notably consistent. The first line of defence is normally to check if the criticism is coming from a man . If so, they play the man, not the ball, and call them hateful misogynists (who unlike the blue tickers tweeting from their chaise lounge, are definitely tweeting from a stained wankpit). This then diverts the discussion from the shitearsed rubbish blue tick cunt is coming out with to the dynamic of a playground where outsiders from the discussion rush to pile on to defend the supposedly weaker (yet practically speaking, enormously more powerful) woman without taking even a moment to read what it's all been about. This really isn't a moment of triumphalism but a cheap way of latching onto a moral highground. It's one of the great many things about Twitter that makes it so awful.

[BlodwynPig]

I see John Harris' latest idea to help the destitute. Guarantee a jobless family of 4 £10,000 pounds a year to live on.

And a Grundig TV

[monkfromhavana]

And a Grundig TV

On rental from Rumbelows.

[BlodwynPig]

On rental from Rumbelows.

Make sure you have enough coins for the leccy meter

[Sebastian Cobb]

Make sure you have enough coins for the leccy meter

Or the telly itself if the Rumbleows contract isn't good.

[BlodwynPig]

Or the telly itself if the rumbleows contract isn't good.

"Terrrrryyyy gis us a quid 'enders is startin'"

A quote from a former Guardian journalist in 2024 after her and her mates have been dumped by their political sugar daddies at the Dawn of the Neu British Reich

[Fambo Number Mive]

For diehard Remoaners like me, all this endless good news about jabs and carbon emissions is pretty hard to take

For those of us who like to talk Britain down, all this good news is hard to take. The vaccination figures are shocking. Nearly 20 million first doses administered. A forward-thinking procurement plan. The leading large nation, far ahead of the US and, more gallingly for us frothing Remoaners, miles ahead of Europe. Nothing could be more depressing for the honest self-loathing liberal Brit. You know the type. Recycle assiduously but fly once a fortnight.

We can't say we haven't had a good run. The past few years have been wonderful. Any positive stories could be written off as a fluke or a statistical aberration. There has been abundant bad news to confirm what we already knew: Britain is a sad, grey little Plague Island in the Atlantic, incapable of relinquishing its past glories and heading full tilt towards irrelevance. Brexit has been Gloomster Glastonbury.

Surely the pandemic can't have exposed shortcomings in having a pan-continental uber-bureaucracy?
The early days of the pandemic were promising, too. We had the dithering over lockdown, the PPE fiasco and the Barnard Castle drive-by. All reinforced our narrative of total incompetence. A simple eye-roll was usually enough to convey your membership of the told-you-so club. What do you expect from 10 years of Tory rule? The turkeys voted for Christmas. It's our children and grandchildren I'm worried about.

The self-loathers hadn't had it so good since Suez. But this year life is increasingly bewildering. The test-and-trace fiasco was comforting. It proved that when the Tories combine public money with private businesses, an orgy of cronyism ensues. Yet the vaccine programme has turned out to be a slick collaboration between hard-nosed businesspeople, big pharma and the academic establishment. It's almost as confusing as Gillian Anderson playing Margaret Thatcher. Even Private Eye conceded that they'd been "harsh" on vaccine tsar Kate Bingham.

It turns out it might not only be vaccinations that Britain is excelling at. An article in the Economist, not normally given to jingoism, pointed out the UK's success in cutting carbon emissions. For several months last year the UK burned no coal. It looks likely that soon it won't burn any at all. You might argue we've outsourced emissions to China, but so has everyone else. The bitterest pill is that we're beating Germany. Germany, the nation self-loathing Brits revere more than any other. Germany, which welcomes every immigrant, has sensible governments, and has only ever craved peaceful European integration...

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/feb/28/i-hate-to-say-it-but-britains-doing-ok-even-germany-envies-us

Oh dear. Most people critical of Britain don't like "talking Britain down", they are critical of it because they want to improve it. I'm delighted that the vaccine is being rolled out quickly in the UK, why would this be "hard to take". While it gives Johnson cult people something to boast about, it doesn't make up for how badly the government have handled the rest of the pandemic. Talking about "frothing Remoaners" and "gloomsters", it reads like a Spectator article.

Comments are off, of course.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

It's an empty vacuous piece of short termist window in the clouds shite with nothing but the most superficial expedient analysis applied, designed to be slurped up and shat back out as soon as it enters. Disregard it, and don't draw attention to this or similar stuff that is clearly pitched at a John Crace level.

[Cuellar]

Ooooohhh theyy've...

[Ferris]

Ooooohhh theyy've...

Everyone at the graun opinion section on this tactic relies.

[Mobbd]

That really is quite shocking and worthy of the Mail or the Express.

[idunnosomename]

oh shit really you clueless bee-swallowing cunt? thanks for the fucking memo

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/feb/28/levelling-up-austerity-cuts-local-government-services-bankruptcy

[BlodwynPig]

oh shit really you clueless bee-swallowing cunt? thanks for the fucking memo

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/feb/28/levelling-up-austerity-cuts-local-government-services-bankruptcy

can surely warm to the prospect of packed pub gardens, revived music festivals and family reunions.

so very fucking 21st century beige man of the centre.

[Barry Admin]

This seems to have turned into another shite, never-ending list thread now, that's destined to swallow up any future discussion about anything that ever happens in the Guardian.

If there's an article that merits a discussion, please START A THREAD ABOUT IT.  It wrecks me that there's still so much necro-posting on here, or even worse, the "this probably doesn't go here, but..." thread-jacking from people who obviously know a new thread should be started instead.

Let me know if there's anything here that merits a thread split. Thanks.