This insensitive basically
I'm a lilly livered middle-class university going freeloading left wing socialist student just as much as anyone, but I have a problem with some of the journalistic articles which are produced by left wing media outlets. I think it probably stems from the fact that the majority of media outlets are right-wing, pro-government or nationalistic in outlook, so even when a leftie says something clearly moronic there's a tendency to over look it (Julian Assange, right there). My first example would be George Monbiot's wonderfully timed defence of nuclear power. There might be some validity in arguing that Fukushima should not effect the judgement of European nations as to the safety of nuclear plants, but he goes one further and claims that the disaster has, in fact, improved his view of nuclear energy. Not only is this simply stupid because it can't improve anybody's view of nuclear power, but it's also unnecessarily insensitive. It smacks of attention grabbing insecurity, and of course places him under the category of 'prick'.
Now I can understand the Guardian letting that one slip by, George Monbiot has plenty of fans and is one of their most well known writers, who publishes articles for them all the time (perhaps too often). But the next one I would like to draw to the attention of my avid readers is harder to explain. Firstly, unlike Monbiot, Alice Miles isn't really making any sort of point, she's just complaining. Cue the 'time of the month' jokes, but this article really is absolute tripe. If tripe were indeible shit. It has all the incoherency of an enraged fourteen year old who hates her parents, got rejected by the captain of the football team, and has just watched her first episode of Newsnight, and the sheer insensitivity and poor choice of its timing is, as with Georgie's article, abysmal. The root of this article seems to be that she is enraged because a friend called to see if she was ok after the 7/11 bombings, clearly not a friend she likes vey much, and I can't understand what she hopes this article will achieve or what it will say about her. Why Newstatesman chose to print it and offer it as one of their choice articles of the day is beyond me. Essentially both of these articles are narcissistic rants shrieked by reactionary authors desperate for confirmation that everybody in the world excepting themselves is an idiot, and so sensitivity and social awareness have been cast aside in favour of the misplaced righteousness of an idiot.
