Come work at the Guardian, where the party never stops.
A less impressed commenter, unrelated to the editor, asks,
What is it with people’s inability to ignore the things they don’t like?
Meaning things you don’t like and which have no bearing whatsoever on your everyday life or the turning of the world. Say, “our” alleged “obsession” with cupcakes and their supposedly debilitating effects on helpless, hapless womenfolk. Women being so mentally insubstantial that even a tiny cake can unhinge their minds, apparently. But fretting ostentatiously about things of no importance has long been a standard template for Guardian articles, especially if you can shoehorn in some sophomoric theorising. It’s something most papers do to some extent, due to the obligation to Fill Space Somehow, but the Guardian is by far the greatest exponent and the most grandiose. Many of its contributors have mastered inadvertent surrealism. First you find some tiny, utterly trivial personal anecdote or grumble and then inflate it to sociological status with lots of wild, baseless assertion. Anything from the feminist politics of toddler excrement to the cruel, cruel agonies of spellcheck software. Whether the complaint is valid, or even sane, or can withstand a minute’s scrutiny, really doesn’t matter. It’s all about display — being outraged as theatre and social positioning. Which is why something as dull as temporary building renovation can be described vehemently, repeatedly and in all seriousness as “cultural apartheid.”
David Thompson, “The Cupcake Menace”, David Thompson, 2013-10-20.
October 21, 2020
QotD: The Guardian
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