People really love slagging-off media studies don't they. My mum was a media studies lecturer when I was growing up. It was incredibly healthy to have someone able to talk critically about what that box in the living room was beaming out.
This idea that it is intelligent to be able to critically appraise what's in novels, but not what's on the TV, is so deranged.
I also had an English teacher who would show us films and then frequently pause them to show how they were made, what they were trying to say, the way lighting and music were trying to make us feel a certain way.
Almost everyone spends a significant part of their life watching the screen and being influenced by it. The idea that it is somehow lazy or intellectually subnormal to care about that, and try to understand it, is properly bizarre.
The only conclusion you can really come to when someone slags off media studies is that they are trying to make up for their own intellectual insecurity.
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I'm very sorry to hear Andrew Mitchell sell his soul on the radio right now. A formerly decent man with knowledge of his subject area who must know the nonsense he is spewing. He should hang his head in shame.
He insists there are functioning safe passages for Afghans to the UK through ARAP. Wrong. In reality, countless thousands of Afghans have been let down and betrayed by Britain. But even if it was true, you could then easily accept the amendment.
He suggests, in a truly lunatic argument, that calls for an independent assessment of Rwanda's safety verge on racism. In fact, they maintain some sense of objectivity by preventing the government from defining reality.
Once again, the Lords fight back against Rwanda. I thought they'd resist a couple times then let it go. I was wrong.
The Lords is consistently attacked by left and right. On weeks like this, you realise how utterly essential they are. The Commons is powerless against the government. The Lords are not.
It's not just the resistance. Notice the issues they're focusing on & the manner they've done so. They've picked two key aspects: independent assessment of safety & protecting British allies. And they've done so with practical, pragmatic, workable solutions - not grandstanding.
The Commons rejected all Lords amendments on the Rwanda bill last night. This is actually relatively surprising. There was an expectation that the government would accept at least some of them.
In particular, we thought they might accept an amendment protecting victims of modern slavery and another exempting armed forces personnel & their families from removal. We assumed that on the basis of basic decency. And were therefore predictably wrong.
There are only two things that can stop this bill: Tory moderates in the Commons and Labour peers in the Lords. Both look likely to fail.
Nothing is going to take place over the next 6 months. No meaningful legislation, no attention to public services. Each in-depth weekend newspaper article will essentially say the same thing, which is that the Tories are fucked and don't know what to do about it.
MPs will go to parliament & ministers will make Commons statements, but it'll all be pointless. The machinery of govt has stopped. Power has drained from No10. Only activity left is people figuring out which post-election leadership candidate they want to hitch their wagon to.
The stories will get more and more dramatic precisely because of the absence of real news. But it's all for nothing. Everyone knows how this ends. It's just a question of waiting for the prime minister to initiate his own downfall.
Those are people, god damn you. When we actually process the claims, the majority are granted asylum. That means they are fleeing torture, war and oppression. They're not something for two rich men to do a bet about, like it was a harmless fucking game.
Beside myself with disdain. Piss-poor privileged embarrassments, without the slightest sense of the gravity of the lives they play with.
It's pure drama. Just the just preposterous fucking full bore goddamn drama.
That moment when Paul stood up and it cut to each face in turn - all of them absolutely rinsed with tension, but in completely different ways, with completely different motives. It's like an entire HBO box set condensed into one minute.