This is a nice one:
“It is not to be supposed that the death of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand will have any immediate or salient effect on the politics of Europe.”
I think the quality of predictions in geo-politics or economics hasn't improved much since then.
The Guardian has in 200 years only won one Pulitzer, for Glenn Greenwald's reporting on intelligence agency wiretapping and other malfeasance. And what does the Guardian do? They repeatedly malign Greenwald and publish falsehoods about him. See this thread for a typical example: <a href="https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1388826988736126976" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1388826988736126976</a><p>The problem isn't just that the Guardian gets major stuff wrong, and that they don't -- as a matter of course -- acknowledge mistakes. The big, no huge, problem is that they do almost no real journalism whatsoever.<p>(I can also pick nits about this article that getting global cooling wrong and asbestos doesn't mean anything because those were mundane mistakes that are not indicative of a larger problem, but I'd rather focus on the big picture that The Guardian doesn't do real journalism and the big things they get wrong as a consequence they never acknowledge, not even in articles like these.)<p>edit: bonus link about how the Guardian silences and fires journalists who tweet sarcastically about sensitive topics. Thread: <a href="https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1359544245238005760" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1359544245238005760</a>
Ah, the eternal question. How do you respond to this? Applaud and encourage even more thorough self-reflection, or criticize because the self-reflection was not thorough enough?
Guardian's "WikiLeaks: Secrets and Lies" Documentary:
Guardian hacks continue PR war against WikiLeaks<p>wikileaks.org/Guardian-s-WikiLeaks-Secrets-and.html
No mention of Nazi Germany, I'm curious to know what their position was. My understanding is that The Times was very sympathetic to Hitler's claims of not having bad intent regarding Czechoslovakia and regularly railed against the government for not giving their support
The left wing film director Lindsay Anderson who directed the movie "If..." starring Malcolm McDowell about an uprising in a British public school was asked why he didn't read The Guardian but the right wing Telegraph newspaper. He replied by saying that it was easier to spot the lies...<p>Personally I think the Guardian deserves support as the only real opposition or left newspaper in the UK. It's really flawed and the lies are harder to see but it fulfils an essential role in society.
More recently: <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/feb/23/pcc-guardian-mark-duggan-headline" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/feb/23/pcc-guardian-m...</a>
It is striking that the mainstream positions today would have been considered radical leftism at most points in the past.<p>If the same pattern holds, then radical leftist positions of today will be again the mainstream positions in the future.<p>The lag time has been considerable though. I think even into the 90’s the guardian would not have approved of the suffragette’s direct action methods.<p>In some ways though things have stagnated for almost a century; Bernie Sanders public health care plan is something that was being pushed for a century ago, and the forces of private capital have managed to hold back the tide for a hundred years.<p>So it might be that my prediction that the radical left of today is the mainstream of tomorrow is totally wrong, and things could actually regress.
A rather strange article. In some ways quite perceptive and reflective, but in other ways the opposite.<p>One of the first examples is a little odd.<p><i>errors of scientific understanding resulted in a 1927 article that promoted the virtues of asbestos</i><p>It's a bit unclear what "errors of scientific understanding" means here, but in context this makes it sound like the Guardian writers mis-understood scientists who were warning about the dangers of asbestos. The report presented to Parliament about the dangers of asbestos didn't arrive until 1930 and before that there was only a single known case of asbestosis in the UK, so that seems to deflect attention from the fact that the errors - if you want to call a lack of knowledge an error - were by scientists, not the Guardian writers.<p>Towards the end we have this:<p><i>"Since then, referendums have become, much to the paper’s displeasure, an established part of our constitution, used as a way to stamp democratic legitimacy on to controversial ideas and as a tool of party management"</i><p>Perhaps one day they'll be writing a similar backwards-looking piece apologizing for having held this view too. At the start they rail against the paper's former imperialism and feelings of superiority, then claim that referendums are a problem because they legitimize "controversial ideas". This from a paper which delights in publishing controversial and extreme ideas:<p><a href="https://twitter.com/somuchguardian?lang=en" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/somuchguardian?lang=en</a><p>A few select headlines:<p>"The tears of joy emoji is the worst of all - it's used to gloat about human suffering"<p>"Brexit will spell the end of British art as we know it"<p>"Can male writers avoid misogyny?"<p>"What if we're living in a computer simulation?"<p>"Robots are racist and sexist"<p>etc. Perhaps some of these will make future lists.