Any chance we can get a black bar for him? His ideas were so interesting that I think it would be appropriate, even though he wasn't involved in the history of computing per se.
Below his pinned tweet on the Guardian is this tweet from him, mentioning the writer of the opinion piece you link (Aditya Chakrabortty):
> this is the "cred" they built up by publishing people like me, .@OwenJones84, .@GeorgeMonbiot, .@chakrabortty - all of whom I very much respect. They used us so no one would believe they would simply lie to destroy any chance of a left gov't. But that's exactly what they did. - https://twitter.com/davidgraeber/status/1210323190402162704
I actually respect David Graeber a whole lot more than the others he mentions here because he didn't let his access to the Guardian stop him from calling them out. Going as far as to say he wouldn't write for them again.
I know a number of people who will never trust the Guardian again. Unfortunately I know more who simply believed the lies.
I'm glad Graeber said all this because he confirmed what a lot of people suspected was the case.
So an especially sad loss, as well.
All of the accusations of antisemitism were dismissed by his supporters out of hand, but some were legitimate, likely not in any personal antisemitism but in a willingness to turn a blind eye to antisemitism in ideological allies.
David Graeber seems an impressive guy, but that doesn’t mean he’s right in everything.
Even at the end of the year, the Tory party had failed to address it in any meaningful sense[2]
In no way did he get an easy ride. Every single tabloid and media outlet was, on the whole, against him from the start. There was a London School of Economics study a number of years back, showing definively that press coverage of Corbyn was nowhere near balanced[3]. That's not even to take into account that during the election debate, the BBC edited out laughs, by the audience, directed at Johnson's comments[4]. The bbc committed a number of "editorial mistakes" that represented themselves as Tory bias.
[1]: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2019-50561043
[2]: https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/islamophobia-conservati...
[3]: https://www.lse.ac.uk/media-and-communications/research/rese...
[4]: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/nov/25/bbc-admits-mis...
or perhaps the article linked from the show notes: https://novaramedia.com/2020/04/14/i-feel-both-furious-and-v...
I'm nowhere near qualified to assess how accurate all of this is, but it all feels eerily similar to how the supposed American left, the Democrats, actively undermined Bernie Sanders in ways that IMO went too far. While I'm sure that's also up for debate, I at least followed the Bernie campaign closely.
> this is the "cred" they built up by publishing people like me, .@OwenJones84, .@GeorgeMonbiot, .@chakrabortty -
I will challenge on the term 'occasional'.
George Monbiot writes a weekly column
Owen Jones writes a regular column
Aditya Chakrabortti writes a regular column and is their senior economics commentator.
This reduces your opening paragraph to, "By regularly publishing left wingers, by employing them on its staff, by publishing left wing material, the Guardian seeks to pass itself off as a left wing paper. " Well...yes.
I should also say that the idea that the Labour anti-semitism scandal was a plot to smear Corbyn, is not universally acknowledged even amongst left wingers.
I spent some time helping collect examples of the Guardian's output during its obsession with attacking Jeremy Corbyn. Try to find comparable coverage in support of Corbyn in the Guardian to offset these attack pieces published between 2015 and 2017: https://theguardian.fivefilters.org (note that Owen Jones, far from being a dissenting voice, joined in with the attacks here, later apologising).
David Graeber tweeted a link to this at the time - after all the Guardian's doomsayers were proven wrong. https://twitter.com/davidgraeber/status/874853587880423426
After some time the Guardian intensified its attacks, this time focusing on spurious claims of antisemitism. They refused to run Graeber's piece defending Corbyn. Again, see if you can find comparable coverage defending Corbyn in the Guardian compared to ones trying to tar him with the antisemite brush: https://theguardian.fivefilters.org/antisemitism/
And that's of course not mentioning the study that found the Guardian to be one of the most innacurate in reporting claims of antisemitism (more so than even the Sun and the Daily Mail). That little fact is still the pinned tweet on Graeber's Twitter account, which must really annoy the Guardian when his name's trending on Twitter. https://twitter.com/davidgraeber/status/1210322505229094912
He's another of the Look-We-Publish-Left-Wing-Opinion go-tos for the Guardian centrists.
I doubt it annoys the Guardian at all. I think they are more than used to this kind of criticism.
Criticism they can ignore (as they often do) I'm sure doesn't bother them. But the widespread resentment toward the Guardian does bother them. It was apparent from their writers' responses when #BoycottTheGuardian was trending on Twitter for example, or more recently when they announced big job cuts and their writers pleas for support were mostly met with derision.
Eg.I was very critical of Corbyn's stance on Brexit, and having a few followers I captured the attention of the Corbynite WhatsApp group run by Seamus Milne's team, and was heavily trolled...Rachel Swindon et al... and I block trolls, so fell out of the Corbynite bubble. The result of this is I have not seen widespread outrage against the Guardian at all. Perhaps widespread in revolutionary socialist circles is a more correct assertion.
This is a conspiracy theory with no basis in fact.
"“I do get advice from them,” she said. “But that’s the end of that.”
She eventually explained that there are several private Twitter DM groups where discussion goes on “all day”, with new pro-Corbyn lines posted alongside anti-Tory memes — which are often taken and repurposed from Facebook groups.
Asked whether Labour officials were in the groups speaking to the pro-Corbyn accounts, she said “Maybe”, smiling."
https://www.buzzfeed.com/markdistefano/heres-the-woman-behin...
It was tangential to my point, but Corbynite trolls were just as nasty and just as organized as the right wingers. Everyone not for Corbyn was neoliberal scum, or a 'yellow Tory'. In the end this only serves to shut down real debate and polarise each bubble.
When you got trolled, it wasn't because of a secret WhatsApp group conspiring against you. It was because you said something that a large number of left wing people disagreed with, and Twitter worked the way it usually works and encouraged an organic pile-on. I can assure you that the UK left-wing network on Twitter has no need to get marching orders from a mythical WhatsApp group. If somebody says something that the left disagrees with, pile-ons will happen naturally.
Ironically, by dismissing people who disagree with you as commanded by Seumas Milne, you are shutting down debate yourself.
Nice euphemism.
It's one thing to wax lyrical about a utopian left wing ideal. It's quite another to then be a willing attack dog for an establishment that is hell bent on killing any hope of something like it flourishing:
"The Corbyn era certainly has been buried. It was never going to survive its complacency over Boris Johnson, its failure to treat allegations of antisemitism with any urgency, or its years spent umm-ing and ahh-ing over Brexit."
One of those examples was part of a baseless smear campaign (partly on behalf of a foreign state) that the Guardian helped spread, quite deliberately.
It's quite audacious for a newspaper to attack a public figure with a baseless smear campaign and then try to attack them on the basis that they didn't appropriately deal with the smear campaign they helped run.