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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First, we've no idea if that Reform number is right. Second, come on people what's the matter with you. After 14 years of the most egregious reactionary horror, we're about to get one of the most progressive parliaments in history.
Everything changes now. Everything. Not just the policies, but much deeper than that.
The values and the personalities of the people in charge will be entirely different. You might not like every position they adopt, but they will hold a bundle of decent, humane, tolerant progressive instincts which are completely opposed to what we've seen for the last decade.
Right. TV debates. Basically the worst possible way to spend an evening. I'm starting with this. I do not rule out escalating to rum and possibly arsenic.
Are they in some kind of 90s video game?
Sunak has a difficult message here: Starmer will do this (BAD) but also we don't know what he'll do (ALSO BAD). He really needs to settle for one or the other. It's rather a struggle to convince people of both contradictory things at the same time.
A little while back, Gary Frank, one of the greatest superhero artists alive, put my book on the cover of his comic.
My brain basically collapsed with joy. When I had put it back together, I asked him if I could buy the original art.
He said yes - except that he refused to sell it to me and instead asked that I make a donation to Veterans Aid.
Original comic art is worth a lot, especially for someone at this level - 100s of £, often more. It's a preposterously generous thing for him to have done.
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.