What would I do in the morning without The Guardian to wake me up? Nothing gets the blood pumping around my enlarged heart like the latest dispatch from the padded cell that is the comment section – a place where wealth is vulgar, faith is sexist, the Union Jack is racist and bestiality is a private matter between you and your parakeet. Toby Young has drawn attention to Martin Kettle's crazy comparison of the British press to the National Rifle Association. Here are my candidates for the five loopiest Guardian thinkpieces: 1. Take time out of your day to hug a paedophile. Jon Henley quotes figures saying that between 1-2 per cent of men are potential child molesters (suggesting there are more paedophiles than Lib Dem voters) and that it is a varied, complex thing worthy of empathy. Henley wasn't endorsing any particular take on this unpleasant subject, but his objective tone when quoting sources turned a few stomachs:
Of course, dinosaur traditionalists like me would insist that a 60-year old going to bed with a 12-year old is in itself an "undesirable outcome". But, then, Right-wingers aren't the cleverest people… 2. Conservatives are morons. According to George Monbiot, scientists have established as an "empirical fact" that "conservatism thrives on low intelligence and poor information". This is why conservatives are suckers for racism, homophobia, sexism, after all:
By contrast, reading the Guardian is the "critical pathway" towards snobbery and intellectual bigotry. Or so the experts say. 3. Communism wasn't all bad. Yes, you might have been at daily risk of getting shot for wearing glasses – but at least your corpse was guaranteed a job for life. To quote Seumas Milne,
Now, if a journalist wrote that about Nazism, they'd rightly end up out of a job and living in a van down by the river. 4. Public enjoyment at the Diamond Jubilee reminded us that the Brits are dirt-munching, cap-doffing serfs. So poisonous is the existence of royal corgis and Prince Andrew that Citizen Toynbee thinks they reduce us to the status of childlike acolytes:
It's not terribly English, either Polly. But the Guardian doesn't mind German dictators so long as they're members of the EU Commission. 5. North Korea is the victim of press bias, says Paul Watson. Read it and weep:
Of course, the reason for the "lack of western sources in North Korea" is that it's a dictatorship that controls the press. And the reason why we imperialist hacks tend to "pigeonhole the DPRK as a dangerous maverick state" is because it pushes drugs through its embassies, threatens to nuke the US, butchers its internal opposition and starves its people to death. But the upside – Mr Kettle – is that its journalists know their place |
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Friday, May 03, 2013
The Five Loopiest Guardian Articles of All Time according to Tim Stanley
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