Posts by Craig Ranapia
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The news media came to believe that being underwritten by advertising was a birthright, and it wasn’t. The phenomenon that sees The Guardian, a paper with around 200,000 readers in print, reach an internet audience of 36 million is the same that sees The Guardian burn up its trust account at the rate of £30 million to £40 million every year.
Well, yes. And after reading this, I don't know how long the London Review of Books, and it's generously and promptly paid contributors, is going to survive when editor Mary-Kay Wilmers' family trust is no longer under-writing things.
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Hard News: Telecom and TV, in reply to davesparks,
First one to make it easy gets my money.
Sometimes you just need to state the bleeding obvious, because "plug in and play" is a siren call to me. :)
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Hard News: Poor Choices, in reply to Bart Janssen,
One reason for the judgement is that some suicides are self obsessed and even selfish acts. Sometimes the things left behind cause a great deal of harm to those living. In those cases, yeah there is some judgypants going on.
OK, and I can respect that framing if that’s what some survivors need to do when working through grief. But what’s not useful or acceptable: People who assume that a newspaper column, or an internet connection, gives then standing to shit on complete strangers as weak-willed narcissistic arseholes because they suffer from depression, or self-harm, or are addicts (have we forgotten Philip Seymour Hoffman already?)
The dead are beyond caring or harm when you decide to model the new season “judgypants”. But it would show a lot of empathy (and common human decency) if everyone thought harder about who’s listening when mental illness and self-harm are treated like they're the result of a lack of dietary moral fibre.
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Hard News: Poor Choices, in reply to Jack Cottrell,
*TW: explicit discussion of suicide*
The only suicides I consider selfish are the ones which basically make someone else kill you. Train jumpers, death-by-cop.Let's not go there at all, please. BTW, Jack, my partner was a train driver when a woman threw herself in front of his train many years ago and is coming up on his 50th year working in the industry. Any rail-related fatality is dreadful for a lot of people, and can have profound and long-lasting effects. We can respect that without getting into shaming value-judgements of anyone.
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Hard News: Poor Choices, in reply to Russell Brown,
Grimshaw effectively lecturing David Herkt for not settling down and starting a family, on the other hand, is just silly.
What the fuck? That's a whole lot of rich coming from someone who has taken a lot of very public exception to being patronized her as a smarmy Remmers yummy-mummy, with a law degree and an (in)famous Daddy, who has made a career out of over-sharing her first world problems.
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Hard News: Poor Choices, in reply to Russell Brown,
Every pundit has patches where it's painfully obvious they're just cranking out their 800 words to make the deadline (and get paid), but there's others -- like Burchill who are well and truly past their use-by date. The style had turned into mannerisms, and the zesty provocations are pure shtick. I know this is hipster blasphemy, but basically everything Hunter S. Thompson published after 1980 was embarrasing.
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Hard News: Poor Choices, in reply to Russell Brown,
There's that too - a half-arsed troll is every bit as gross as it sounds. :)
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Hard News: Poor Choices, in reply to Russell Brown,
Because we really haven’t had enough rambling, narcissistic columns on this topic.
And of course, Burchill couldn’t resist another snide round of self-congratulation at trolling trans people and getting exactly the reaction she was looking for. (Of course, any pushback from trans people and allies instantly gets framed as “bullying” from “dicks in chicks’ clothing” obsessed with "semantics" – but perhaps we’ve exhausted the useful conversation on that kind of bullshit bingo hereabouts.)
It's easy to extol the "joys of online hatred" and a good "online bitch-fight" when you're used to setting the rules of engagement -- and pulling the plug when shit gets too real for your comfort. Privilege, it's a thing. And boy, Burchill doesn't like having hers challenged.
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Hard News: Poor Choices, in reply to Russell Brown,
Along with everything else that's horribly fucked up about that column, it's seriously unedifying watching another round of pass-the-ticking-parcel punditry. Charlotte Dawson was bullied -- but it was all done by THEM never US. Hell, I'd suggest its time for certain people to grow the fuck up but that's insulting to children.
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Hard News: Poor Choices, in reply to Stephen Judd,
Some people use it frivolously. Some don’t. To focus on the frivolous is just prejudice.
It makes about as much as sense as bagging the printing press as “frivolous” tech, because it’s used to produce tabloid newspapers and porn as well as the deep and meaningful stuff. I’m also down with the proposition that dicks be dicking no matter what the medium, same as it ever was and will always be.