Soap Culture

Soap operas are a popular form and can bring enormous entertainment and more importantly support and education to their followers. centred on soap operas and presumably important to sustain dramtic tension and audience interest are the emotional aspects of assorted life situations. This emphasis on the need for emotional demonstration in a drama seems to have spread into real life to an enormous degree and not ina healthy way. We now have increasingly, on important issues in real life persons in the public eye being constrained to make public demonstrations of emotion which we must suppose they do not necessarily feel. At every tragedy we must its seems have tears and at every triumph cheers. Persons in public life cannot be expected to do this with more than a passing gesture to sincerity. And so public life becomes more of a charade daily. Today, for example we had a judge handing down sentences for murder and homicide having to pause and choke back tears. That is taking things too far. We all have our own feelings and those in the public eye cannot be expected

Science in difficulty.

In a range of unexpected places the integrity of science is under threat. The National Institutes of Health is chaired by Francis Collins who is some form of creationist, assorted science projects and communication channels are contaminated by money from the Templeton Foundation, Nature magazine is increasingly encouraging accommodation  with religionists, big money is spent on projects like Encode yet staffed by individuals lacking the necessary knowledge to direct or interpret their findings and the Royal Society, in addition to short listing unscientific works for its book prize has opened its halls to a range of speakers and lent its prestige to the promulgation of material which is distinctly unscientific. Let us be clear - the method of science is our most reliable guide to the production of useful knowledge and we debase it at our peril. The stakes are high - we need to resist these developments. Spread the word, deride despise defeat.

Politics v Government

These two activities are becoming incompatible. Politics is becoming a multimedia rich arm of the entertainment industry with success going to politicians who excel at that mass media frenzied fracas. We vote for media savvy people. Government on the other hand is a serious matter requiring a different skill set characterized by the ability to see and analyse problems and their possible solutions together wit a capacity to focus firmly on the task in hand and make substantial effort to get a useful result. While there may occasionally appear an individual who excels in both domains that is extremely unlikely. If we are to have good government we need to resolve this issue. Politics as a popular form of entertainment can continue happily away from such mundane concerns as truth reality or practicality as at present but to preserve us from these follies we need a new model of government involving well educated and trained individuals with talent directly relevant to the task in hand.
This unfortunate dichotomy has always been present but with modern media it is overwhelming and is now as serious a concern as the similar disjunction between religion with its rituals and supernatural beliefs which are of no significance to most of us and the practical issues of morality which directly affect us all.

The Oscars.

The Twitterocracy dont like the Oscars nominations.  Racist,  homophobic,  misogynist hardly covers it.  The solution is simple. Change the nominators.  Don't have boring experts who know what they are talking about.  Let the Twitter rats nominate and nominate and vote and they will get what they want.  It'll kill Hollywood but that is surely a small price to pay.