The Guardian

Being a fairly open minded but at times righteous, middle-class liberal I should literally love the Guardian. It should be my bible; leading me to some kind of organic food filled, climate change ending, equality centric mecca where everyone is unfailingly polite to each other. Instead it's starting to really piss me off.

The G2 section is the worst offender. I think it is purposely being turned into an horrific caricature of liberal views. Like a reverse Daily Mail where, instead of calling for the murder of all pedophiles and the deportation of anyone 'a bit funny looking', it campaigns for human rights for all free-range farm animals and the compulsory return to stone age technologies in order to avert the imminent global warming doomsday. It almost as if it's just a massive conspiracy, created to make all liberals look like the wussy, cotton headed cowards which right wingers so desire as targets. How else do you describe a front page headline which read "How do I tell my children about climate change?" The article was seriously about breaking the news about global warming to your children without giving them psychological damage. Seriously.

Secondly, G2 is also regularly filled with some of the most vapid pieces of writing ever. A recent article was entitled: 'Geoff Dyer: My secret life of crime' It continued: "There are three episodes in his life that Geoff Dyer prefers not to remember. He could have ended up in jail - but thankfully didn't. So did he just get lucky?" What were these terrible episodes? He threw a milk bottle at a window (but missed), almost crashed into another car (but didn't) and (finally something vaguely dangerous) accidentally smuggled a small bit of weed into the Bahamas. He seems to think that all of these episodes would have led to life in prison and the end of his life as he knew it, if he had been caught and if, in the case of the milk bottle and car crash, they had actually happened. Those are some big ifs. He carries on: "I would estimate that it was about 99% certain that I would pay the price for my actions. But I didn't. I got away with all three of them, scot-free, without a scratch." How on earth did this man come to the figure of 99%? Not by scientific means I imagine; two thirds of his crimes didn't actually happen. As if reading the tedious confessions of a man who has done nothing wrong wasn't bad enough, he ends his piece with a torturously awful simile, even by Hot Rant's standards:

I had a certain amount of random, unprotected heterosexual sex in the 1980s and 90s, but the chances of getting Aids was minimal compared with the chances of facing the consequences of these actions. Put it this way: given the limited extent of my sexual adventures I would have been extremely unlucky to have contracted HIV. These three incidents, on the other hand, would be the equivalent of having unprotected sex with a promiscuous homosexual IV drug-user.

No. They are the equivalent of going to a gay bar which contained one promiscuous homosexual IV drug-user, but not having unprotected sex with him due to you not being gay and only having gone to the bar to accompany a friend. About that risky. Or if you want a made up figure: 3.2%. FC