Newspaper Watch

In our view, that’s a good thing. But as the anti-datacenter movement has grown, it’s come under fire from all sides, including from liberal critics who dismiss it as another privileged form of nimby (not in my backyard) politics with naive demands. A New York Times op-ed, for example, called the fight against datacenters a “myopic” “distraction” from the “real fight”. In truth, anti-datacenter organizing is the real fight, one centered on an industry choke point that people can reach out and touch. This brewing populist resistance isn’t just about limiting local development – it represents a critical new front in the fight against tech-enabled authoritarianism. Where else can people push back on job-eating algorithms, distorting deep fakes, and autonomous drone strikes?

We’ve found some trivial issue we can organise around and thereby haave comfy jobs sa anti-capitalists.

Well done, Lads

Afeature of living at the end of an era is that some events in the present already feel like future artefacts – things you expect to see in a school history book, or a documentary many years from now. Here is King Charles’s 2026 state visit to the United States, right between the chapters on the war on Iran and the global energy crisis. Here is an image of the entire constellation of Trumpland, dining on spring-herbed ravioli and dover sole. Look at this interesting antiquity of the time: the gold plates, the universal sign of a regime at the peak of excess. And there you see the foreign dignitary, making a speech that at the time felt like bold truth-telling, but as we all now know was little more than naive theatre while the whole world teetered on the precipice.

Presumably the belief is that if Nesrine talks portentously of Great Things then Nesrine is a very serious commentator on Great Things. Rather than just being portentous.

The Donald is evil, the US cannot be stood, I’m leaving!

‘I don’t want to be part of a dictatorship’: the Americans queueing up to renounce their citizenship

OK.

In the 00s, the numbers of US citizens renouncing were in the hundreds annually; since 2014, they’ve been in the thousands. This is expected to be a bumper year (matching 2020’s 6,000-plus)

OK.

0.0017% are tryig to leave in any one year.

There are about 800,000 naturalisations each year….the queue running the other way, to get in. If you’re running at 133x the number trying to get in as get out then, well, you know, you might be doing OK?

Still gives Zoe something to write about, no?

Neither figure comes close to the true cost of renouncing if you get a lawyer, which, with no complications at all, will cost $7,000 to $10,000, says Alexander Marino, who heads Moody’s, the largest renunciation law practice in the world.

Blimey. Wonder who suggesated this article to Zoe/the Editor then?

Trump defies attempts to make his actions cohere with any particular strategy. His wars, killing of innocents, and indeed, the threatening of entire civilisations are reshaping the world, but without him even having orchestrated some master plan. He is animated by little more than momentary impulses and resentments.

Not really necessary to read more of Nesrine here. It’s not informative, analytical, it’s performative, political porn for The Elect.

That dreadful man, why isn’t he forced to use the servants’ entrance?

Oh well, guess it sells newspapers.

Imagine your house is on fire, and when you dial 999 the call handler suggests you try putting the blaze out yourself. Resources are tight, you see, and demand high, and the service increasingly relies on volunteers. Or perhaps your child’s maths teacher is off sick. The headteacher texts and asks if you can leave work to explain algebra to the class. It’s your family, after all, so shouldn’t you be the one to help?

The idea is ludicrous of course. And yet that’s exactly what is happening to the almost 6 million people in the UK who are unpaid carers for sick, disabled and older relatives. While we rightly wince at headlines of DIY dentistry and patients on NHS waiting lists crowdfunding for surgery, it has long been normalised for family to fill the gaping holes in the social care system.

Or a horrific one, obviously.

Is the state there to fill in the gaps between society’s activities? Or should the state do everything and society fill in the State’s cracks?

The whole social contract of Dubai involves a wilful blindness to the proximity of suffering and violence. After all, Gaza is geographically close.

Ta Dah! See? Those bastard tax exile influencers in Dubai are close to Gaza and the Eeeevil Jooos! Let ’em burn!

It’s also 1,500 miles. The distance from London to Tunisia. Or London to Istanbul, London to Moscow….

You know, close by.

‘Visible from space’: why Spain has the world’s biggest concentration of greenhouses

Southern weather but with European property rights, not African. From that, plus clustering, etc.

Don’t bother with the piece itself. It’s very clearly PR from the growers’ association. And if it isn’t that then the writer has missed their vocation.

‘A toad is a perfect tenner’: experts recommend wild candidates for new banknotes

We have experts in what should be on banknotes now?

Tony Juniper…Chris Packham….Lucy Lapwing….Isabella Tree….Hannah Bourne-Taylor….

The Guardian’s continued linguistic degradation. “Expert” now means “Nutter we like”.

Anyway, the Wren:

For the £50 note, as that’s what it’s worth after 80 years of fiat money and MMT.

A war spiralling in the Middle East. A death toll now in the thousands across Iran and Lebanon. Energy prices soaring. The Gulf seized up with Iranian strikes. It’s one of those eras that feels bewildering, incomprehensible, out of control. But there is, at the heart of it, a simple logic: everything that is unfolding is a result of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinians.

Gosh, yes, that is well done Nesrine. Here, have a cookie.

Marseille is a haven for artists and progressives. How could it be on the cusp of far-right rule?
Mary Fitzgerald

The more artists and progressives you’ve got around the further far right your views are driven…..

Let’s spell out what is happening here. A state committing genocide – Israel – has joined forces with an ailing superpower led by an aspiring autocrat. Together they have launched a plainly illegal war, as defined by the UN charter, which prohibits the use of force unless a state faces an actual or imminent attack.

What’s the point of bleating about human rights if we don’t go blow up those who violate them?

Owen’s definition of a Just War here would seem to insist that invading Rwanda to limit the Tutsi slaughter would be unjust. The slaughter of 600k is not an attack on another country now, is it?

Hmm.

Axel Springer’s offer raises fewer questions, but will also need government approval before being confirmed. Its £575m bid is a cash offer. The media giant, which already owns Politico, Business Insider and the German mass-market newspaper Bild, does not own other major UK-centred media assets.

It’s a number of years since I even saw a Business Insider piece let alone saw them break some interesting story or must read piece. Bild, on the other hand, can be great fun. So, which side of the company will run the Telegraph?

The world wants to ban children from social media, but there will be grave consequences for us all
Taylor Lorenz

Presumably the lithium dosage has been corrected…..

The editorial independence of CBS News, and its flagship investigative show 60 Minutes, has been in doubt since the network’s new owner, David Ellison, installed Weiss, an opinion writer and editor with no prior experience in broadcast television.

It’s a very American form of privilege. We, the journalistic class, should be allowed to just get on with it. But of course you have to feed us lots and lots of money to get on with it. But you get no say in what we do – just give us money.

That the journalistic class is ideologically captured is true, obviously, but it’s not the interesting thing about that sense of privilege, is it?

No, our sort, not the Septics type:

Wayward royal Dukes is not exactly a new thing you know…..but if something can be claimed as a crisis then…..

Given the toxicity of social media, a moral question now faces all of us: is it still ethical to use it?
Frances Ryan

With so many platforms rife with racism, misogyny and far-right rhetoric, there must be a point where decent people walk away

As social media is no longer policed by the left – people can just say whatever they want! – therefore no one should use social media. See?

If Labour had sense, it would understand that a broken economic model is the root of Britain’s malaise. It would adopt a programme of progressive taxation to fund investment in broken services and struggling communities.

Owen believes that Britain does not have a progressive taxation system. Silly, ignorant, Owen.

Not that I’d get the job there’s a fatwa against me there. On hte Money pages they’re looking for a senior (ie, not an intern) writer. One necessity is this:

The ideal candidate will be{{:}}

An excellent, accurate writer across a range of styles and formats
Numerate

Numeracy is an interesting, new, requirement for those pages, right?

It’s possible there’s a reason for the fatwa…..

Perhaps deliberately, perhaps she really is this ignorant:

Not, as a columnist, to be a turkey voting for Christmas, but this fetishisation of opinion writing is a bad sign. Points of view should sit in tandem with domestic and global news coverage. News coverage should not be used for partisan ends or cannibalised for commentary. But, more than anything else, the pivot is a symptom of a rightwing-owned media that no longer seeks to report on the world as it is, but creates the world as it wishes it to be.

She’s writing for a paper which has been, is, guilty of vilely slanting the world through “news” reports and which hasn’t had a dissenting voice since they last used my 15 years back*.

For example, anyone seen any even mention of how Scottish Water underperforms the English water companies? Even while there’s been plenty about how vile the English companies are?

But here’s the real thing. She’s British, in a British newspaper, where such things are normal. We know each paper is slanted. That’s how the system works. But then she’s pontificating using the American standards. Which were even possibly appropriate – despite being wildly biased, as it was – in an era of monopoly newspapers in their specific areas. Not it’s about national competition. Which is why that US system is moving to something like the UK.

But leave that aside. She’s complaining that the US newspapoers are becoming partisan and biased. From the lofty perch of the Guardian’s opinion pages. Hypocrisy, ignorance or stupidity, your call.

*This might be hyperbole

John Naughton talks of AI swarms and the like:

So they’ve recreated standard lefty journalism then.

But I think that train’s left the station. Fooled once, twice etc. We all know the public information sources are polluted. Thus a change in who produces them is unlikely to shift that belief.