The British wit

[adidasss]

Ok, I just can't with these people, another Guardian article that has me giggling like an idiot. Here transcribed in its entirety:

Main thoughts on the vaccine: I will ingest this freedom juice any which way it comes. Jab? Yes. Two jabs? Yes, please. Down a vodka ice luge fashioned in a tableau of Jonathan Van-Tam and Chris Whitty looking mildly withering at a lectern? Let me just get my best party dress on. (I understand the product needs to be kept cold, so this feels like one method of delivery that The Science should maybe consider.)

Of course, it’s important to understand that other people have more complex feelings about what might happen. Take former actor Laurence Fox, London’s most fragile man, who recently addressed health secretary Matt Hancock directly via Twitter. “I’m sure I don’t need to say this,” began Laurence promisingly, before spoiling it all by saying it anyway. “But if you do try and take away the last vestiges of my personal freedom by trying to stick a needle in my arm without consent, bring at least four police officers with you, you are going to need them.”

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Wow. I know his TV agent dumped him, but that’s a long way to go for a headline reading “Laurence Fox in cop drama”. Also, you’re going to need one police officer, tops, and could probably do it with a community support officer with a bad back. Still, what’s not to be amused by in the way Laurence pictures vaccination rollout, where the actual secretary of state for health arrives at his flat/faux-boho stockade with four police officers and a big syringe? Perhaps our hero wrote the tweet “after lunch” (an increasingly elastic timeframe, by the looks of things).

Back in the rational world, and without wishing to go out on a limb here, it is fair to say the vaccine is INCREDIBLY GOOD NEWS. And being the first country to approve the vaccine, and therefore the first custodian of said incredibly good news – well, that allows the UK to be positive, magnanimous, gracious and encouraging to the other countries and blocs just behind us in the quest to end the virus that has caused, and continues to cause, death, economic devastation, and loss of freedom and normality all over the world.

Cut to Gavin Williamson’s Thursday morning radio appearance on LBC. “I just reckon,” reckoned the education secretary, “we’ve got the very best people in this country and we’ve obviously got the best medical regulator, much better than the French have, much better than the Belgians have, much better than the Americans have. That doesn’t surprise me at all, because we’re a much better country than every single one of them.” And yet, if that’s the case, explain how our education secretary is Gavin Williamson?

In fairness to Gavin, if you actually listen to the clip, it does seem as if he was attempting a joke. And again, in fairness to him, it does seem that he was also attempting some kind of joke back when he made his famous suggestion that Vladimir Putin’s Russia should “go away and shut up”. On these pieces of evidence, then, the results are in. The statement “the secretary of state was attempting a joke” belongs in the same category of outcome as “the secretary of state was attempting to bath a toaster”. Don’t do it, Gav. It ends badly.

I keep reading that the government and health authorities want trusted celebrities to advocate taking the vaccine. If so, what was the thinking here? “Right, Attenborough’s not answering the phone – let’s get Gavin Williamson out there as a stopgap.”

Despite being the tone-deaf witterings of a serially insecure man, Williamson’s comments got such blanket coverage that it doesn’t seem to be beyond the realms that Anthony Fauci got wind of them. The top US infectious diseases expert certainly seemed to be giving some sort of slapdown when he suggested the UK had “rushed” approval – comments he has since walked back. Perhaps Fauci, too, somehow missed the joke element to Williamson’s posturing. You can hardly blame him – he’s been dealing with Earth’s most insecure man for the past year, and is bound to have a reflexive response to this kind of thing.

As for the business of politicising the approval of the vaccine in any way whatsoever in an era of festering anti-vax sentiment … that feels even more wildly unnecessary and counterproductive. In order for the vaccine to be effective, as many people as possible need to feel minded to take it, and anything that plays on divisions in our already grimly polarised era is crazily unhelpful. Trying to conscript the vaccine into the culture war is the last refuge of people who should really be denied all forms of refuge.

You would have to be a category-five idiot to cross the Brexit and Covid streams, so – inevitably – several government ministers did just that. A special mention for health secretary Matt Hancock, who completely wrongly said the approval had been so swift “because of Brexit”. A shoutout, too, to health minister Nadine Dorries, the imbecile’s imbecile, who claimed it was all “thanks to Brexit”. And a sarcastic handclap for the leader of the House of Commons, Jacob Rees-Mogg, who informed the house: “Germany, France and other European countries haven’t managed to do the same thing. We have and we’re leaving. Draw your own conclusions … as I’m sure the British public will.”

Mmmm. I want to say there’s a fine line between national pride and national boastfulness that’s almost designed to get you a slap … But there isn’t. There’s a very thick, very heavy line between these two ways of acting. It’s both incredible and wearyingly credible that we contrived to end up on the wrong side of it.

And so it was that senior public health officials have had to devote airtime this week to correcting ministerial lies, and lies of implication, instead of focusing entirely on their brilliant news. June Raine, head of the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Authority (MHRA), specifically took time to counter the health secretary’s claim that the MHRA had in any way benefited from Brexit. “We have been able to authorise the supply of this vaccine using provisions under European law,” she stressed, “which exist until 1 January.” No 10 was duly obliged to accept this, despite what its winged idiots were saying. I hope someone in the new, touchy-feely Downing Street rang up every offending minster and screamed: “You’re only supposed to dead-cat BAD NEWS, you absolute braindead amateurs!”

Given the sheer number of people who now lie dead around the globe from this virus, turning it into some attempt at one-upmanship against other nations – even in bungled jest – feels bizarre and distasteful. I mean, what we’re talking about here is something pretty much everyone is yearning for. Turning round to other countries, particularly poorer ones, and doing the political equivalent of “na-nana-naa-nah!”, is kind of a dick move. Furthermore, tough times lie ahead. A government that lies even about good news is, by nature, very bad news indeed.

https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...ication-brexit

I'm quite positive nowhere else in the world would an article like this come out in one of the biggest and most important papers. What are they feeding these people?? :crying:

Also, dayum.

[Trollheart]

****ing brilliant! Makes me want to become a Guardian reader. Almost.

[adidasss]

The Guardian is arguably the best newspaper in the world, what's your problem with it?

[Cuthbert]

It's an awful paper lol.

[adidasss]

Explain yourself!

[Marie Monday]

Yeah I haven't read many guardian articles but while they're hardly objective (but what newspaper is) they seem decent enough, and sassy

[Lucem Ferre]

I don't even know how to read tbh.

[adidasss]

How can anyone not be a fan of this:

Black 3.0: Anish Kapoor and the art world’s pettiest, funniest dispute

Name: Black 3.0.

Age: Six months old.

Appearance: Very black.

How black is very black? So black you would think: how much more black could it be?

Is the answer none? None more black? Not quite, but it claims to be “the blackest black acrylic paint” – as black as Vantablack.

Oh my God! What is Vantablack? Vantablack, created by the scientific research company Surrey NanoSystems, is one of the darkest materials ever created, absorbing 99.96% of the light that hits it.

What is it made of? It is actually a tiny forest of carbon nanotubes grown on a substrate, but there is a (slightly less black) spray paint version, Vantablack S-VIS, which is licensed exclusively to the artist Anish Kapoor.

You mean only he can use it? That is correct. A section of the artistic community was outraged when the deal happened. So incensed was the artist Stuart Semple that he formulated the pinkest pink ever and made it available to everyone – except Kapoor.

How can he stop him buying it? Online purchasers of the paint are required to make a legal declaration that “you are not Anish Kapoor, you are in no way affiliated to Anish Kapoor [and] you are not purchasing this item on behalf of Anish Kapoor or an associate of Anish Kapoor.”

Thorough. But Kapoor managed to get hold of some anyway.

Ooh, what did he do with it? He dipped his middle finger in it and posted the picture on Instagram.

I must say, I do like where this is going. Semple retaliated by moving into the super-black game. In 2017, he came up with a paint called Better Black, followed by Black 2.0 and now Black 3.0, which he says rivals Vantablack for blackness.

And absolutely anyone can buy his miracle paint? Almost anyone.

Will I need three guesses? No. Semple sells Black 3.0 at his newly opened London art shop, The Art Shop, from which Kapoor has been banned.

Who says the modern art world is boring and stupid? It is interesting and stupid! There is a full-time security detail posted on the door, armed with a picture of Kapoor. Semple is also asking customers to sign a declaration on entry “to ensure they will not share my creations with Kapoor or his associates”.

Maybe Kapoor could cover himself in Vantablack and sneak past. I think that is the logical next escalation.

Do say: “I see a red door and I want it painted Black 3.0.”

Don’t say: “Sorry, did you walk into that door again? I should really put a sticker on it or something.”

They have loads of great writers, lots of humour and are normally a progressive left paper (they have some issues with TERFism but nobody's perfect), what's not to like?

[Trollheart]

Fluff/Cuthbert will have a better take on that than I would: he's English. I'm pretty sure it's seen as a mouthpiece of the government or something, not too sure, but it doesn't have a good rep in the UK. The phrase "you're just a Guardian reader" or "I bet you read the Guardian" is never said as a compliment

[adidasss]

Originally Posted by Trollheart

Fluff/Cuthbert will have a better take on that than I would: he's English. I'm pretty sure it's seen as a mouthpiece of the government or something, not too sure, but it doesn't have a good rep in the UK. The phrase "you're just a Guardian reader" or "I bet you read the Guardian" is never said as a compliment

Wait, where are you from?

Also, I guess it depends which side of the political spectrum you lean on.