Friday, July 10, 2015

Congratulations to the Spectator on winning the Anglocentric Lack of Self-Awareness Award for 2015

There's a hysterically funny (in a gloriously unintentional way) article in the Spectator today, in which Kate Chisholm makes a disastrous attempt to poke fun at Nicola Sturgeon for a "gaffe that everyone missed".  There's a good reason why everyone missed it, because she's talking about the fact that Sturgeon was quite understandably mystified when an English radio interviewer asked her about "the big game", without specifying that it was an England women's football match.

"It’s lucky for her there’s no election just around the corner. For a woman who claims to be not your usual style of politician, who listens to her voters, she revealed a surprising lack of nous, of being out of touch with what ‘ordinary’ folk are interested in. How could she not have heard about the match? Had she not realised how big women’s football has suddenly become, headlining the back pages and the news streams day after day in the past few weeks?"

Would that be the English back pages? And the English news streams? As opposed to the back pages and news streams in Scotland - you know, the country that Nicola Sturgeon wants to be independent, and is currently First Minister of? Isn't it just possible that the kind of people who vote SNP will be forgiving of Sturgeon for being "out of touch" with the preoccupations of ordinary people in an entirely different country? I mean, is the Spectator going to start savaging David Cameron for being clueless about the fortunes of the French handball team?

Let's just hope that political magazines don't get punished too severely for being woefully out of touch with their Scottish readers.

To be fair, I did notice a little bit of Scottish interest in the women's World Cup on my Twitter timeline, but probably only a minority of those people were actively supporting England. As for myself, I watched parts of the semi-finals and final, mostly because I went to all of the women's Olympic matches that were played in Glasgow three years ago, and I've maintained a degree of interest since. But I was fairly neutral as far as England were concerned, and if anything I was mildly relieved when they went out, simply because the Anglocentric media reaction would have been so unbearable if they'd won (as the Spectator have just helpfully demonstrated).

22 comments:

  1. To be honest, I wish that politicians felt confident enough to admit when they don't even like sport. Obviously there are some politicians (Alex Salmond, Gordon Brown) who do have a genuine love of sport, but there are plenty of others who are just pretending to make them seem like a man or woman of the people. Take David Cameron getting his football teams muddled up. Though clearly there are still the sort of brain dead cretins around who would think less of a person because they don't follow sport (Especially football).

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  2. I heard the interview live (by accident) - and I too wondered which big game they were talking about. I don't follow football at all.

    But the other thing your readers might want to do, is to listen to the comments at the end of the interview after Nicola had gone off air. Typical BBC arrogance. I wonder if they realize how much they offended Scottish women and those English/Welsh women who voted for Nicola for the Woman's hour list.

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    1. I also chanced to hear it. Nicola was set up, but handled it well once she realised what the interviewer was on about. However I was struck by the comment afterwards from one of the presenters that they " disagreed with everything Nicola stood for". My immediate thought was that would include equality for women, and a fair deal for working people. This was on "Woman's Hour".

      Duh?

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    2. And they wonder why there has been such a drastic drop in TV licence payers.

      Duh?

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  3. Another sign of unionist desperation.

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  4. Looks like a good example of England = Britain conflation. The writer views England as representing Britain and therefore cannot understand why the whole of Britain doesn't equally support them.

    I don't understand why they feel the need to project this. Why not just enjoy the tournament and hope your team wins?

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    1. The usual combination of arrogance and ignorance. (Them, not you!)

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  5. David Cameron is shockingly unaware of today's shinty match at Taynuilt between Oban Camanachd and Newtonmore . Questions should be asked in the house

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  6. its silly season. So there will be a lot of crap like this getting passed off as journalism. Most of it will be froth that no one will pay attention to. The other stuff is just way to smug in its lack of awareness. Like the Daily Record desperately trying to conflate Independence for Scotland with Greece.

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  7. I wouldn't expect England's prime minister to be familiar with shinty any more than any other foreign head of state.
    Typical narrow minded Little Englander attitude.



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  8. Just because they live off of our pockets full of cash, doen't mean we want to live in their pockets. Can't stand the emphasis they put on any sport, it's just a game. Well done Nicola for being unphased by these idiots.

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  9. Surely the biggest gaffe in the article came from Kate Chisholm herself when she wrote:

    "This was Wednesday, night of the World Cup match between England’s women’s soccer team and Japan’s."

    It's football not soccer.

    What a non-story. What more crap will they come out with in the run up to the 2016 elections to smear the SNP with?

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    1. It is SOCCER! It's been SOCCER for 140 years. If you call a ball game SOCCER (Association Football) then everybody on the planet will know what you are talking about.

      If you start talking about football then it depends which country and whereabouts in that country you are having the conversation which particular ball game you mean.

      Sneering about the merkins calling soccer soccer is just wanky anti-Americanism and probably racism by current standards.

      Grow up and start picking your targets with more care.

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    2. Soccer is effectively a nickname for association football. It's not a "wrong" name, but it's not "the" name either.

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    3. At one point, use of the word Soccer in Britain wasn't uncommon, even if it never became as widespread as Football. Use of Soccer seemed to be at its peak from the 1950s until the 1970s. Antipathy towards the term Soccer is only a relatively recent thing.

      Here's an interesting University of Michigan paper on the issue.

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    4. I've always called it soccer as did my peers back in those days maybe the professional game preferred football a bit posher.

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    5. Its fitba to me, end of story

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  10. The UK plays three kinds of football: soccer, and two types of rugby (I'm no expert, one I think is rugby union but i don't know what the other is called, something to do with association, i think)

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  11. I remembered. It's rugby league

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  12. "she revealed a surprising lack of nous, of being out of touch with what ‘ordinary’ folk are interested in."

    On the other hand, she maybe shows enough nous to pay ordinary people the compliment of assuming that their world does not revolve around who kicks a ball into a net somewhere.

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  13. Remember the BBC 6 Nations advert? 2012. Anyone but England!

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  14. I didn't watch any of it. I couldn't stomach the BBC commentators for one and well I happen to be a big fan of a particularly athletic Swedish female footballer. I was heartbroken at their early demise.

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