Friday, May 31, 2013

A moment of merriment in the deep darkness

For those not already aware, the Guardian has set up its own coffee shop. Given the initial descriptions encountered over at Guido's I had a hard time believing it wasn't a complete spoof. I couldn't have dreamed up a better parody of everything that's wrong with the Guardian and its dedicated (though now mostly virtual) readership if I'd tried.

But no, apparently it is real.

In these deeply dark times, there is so much chuckleworthy about this development, from the choice of name - a twitter hashtag - '#guardiancoffee' through to the fact that even though it has billed itself as a 'data driven' venue, right in the middle of London's tech city, it doesn't have wifi....

Whilst there are plenty of laughs to be had following the hashtag (incidentally how can such promoters of social media perpetually get it so wrong, apparently forgetting that no one 'owns' a hashtag....), the reviews are where the absolute gold is. Be sure to check out the Vice review. The GQ one is worth a look too though not nearly as cutting as the former.

Friday, May 24, 2013

Thursday, May 23, 2013

Don't you dare say you didn't see this coming

Andrew Gilligan has been documenting this for a long time:

"Victims say that officers in the borough of Tower Hamlets have ignored or downplayed outbreaks of hate crime, and suppressed evidence implicating Muslims in them, because they fear being accused of racism."

Do read the whole thing, from 2011, it's a litany of failure on the part of the executive arms of the establishment tasked with protecting us from this kind of violence and intimidation and taking radicalisation seriously. Failure mostly as a result of the kind of fear generated by useful idiots like UAF of being accused of racism via disingenuously fuzzing criticism of islam or muslims with racism.

Gilligan has been documenting this for some time now.

UAF types were already at it on twitter yesterday just a couple of hours after the incident already labelling anyone speculating on an islamist connection of being racist. This in spite of the very first reported eyewitness accounts detailing that a white man had just been hacked to death by two black men.

I wanted to call the irony police, but I didn't want to wait 20 minutes.