Yesterday was a busy day. Lots of this and that, lots of interruptions, although we did manage to nip out for a coffee. Derby rush-hour found me sitting in a car dealership waiting-room while our evil fossil fuel transport was serviced.
On the waiting area wall, a large TV showed live Sky news reporting on the whittling down of Tory leadership candidates. What surprised me slightly was the realisation that it must be a long time since I last watched TV news. It isn’t very good and not at all incisive. But you knew that.
The event was so gripping that I found myself counting the number of times a presenter said “er”. Came to about ten times a minute. She was struggling to inject some drama into the proceedings. They all tried to pump up the drama but without the benefit of incisive political reporting it was pretty well impossible. But they tried.
To this casual viewer, it wasn’t enough to go on and on about left and right and political support shifting from here to there and back again. There was no edge to it. When we consider the how inadequate our political classes are, how entangled they are in lunacy, dishonesty, global subservience and moral cowardice, how obvious it is that they are far from being the best we could have –
My overall impression was of a society drowning in pap. Not a new impression of course, but it did reinforce a familiar issue - mainstream pap won’t get us anywhere. Yet pap has a power all of its own which should not be underestimated. To many people, anything which strays too far from pap seems extreme. Stray too far and not enough people are listening. Mainstream pap is genuinely powerful.
The car was fine though. Derby rush-hour is best avoided.
9 comments:
I was thinking the other day about how most of the news is about personalities and how people feel about events. It is entertainment rather than news. And sometimes the 'private' lives of politicians, celebrities, and characters in soap operas seem equally real, equally vacuous.
I don't watch the news, never watch soaps, and wish celebrities would just shut up.
A service, eh? We had to have four new tyres the other day. Our local National Tyre did us proud and had the huge advantage of being open on Sunday. A couple of hundred miles later and a different branch happily checked all the nuts free.
Pretty good. Try getting anything as helpful, quick, competent, and agreeable out of the NHS. And I'll bet National Tyre employees continued to work through the lockdowns without expecting to be treated as heros. It's a pity National Tyre isn't standing for the Conservative leadership.
Deareme is spot on. Nothing illustrates better the divide between the 'laptop group' of govenment employees, administrators and officials and the ordinary people. All through Covid council officials, DVLA bureaucrats, administrators were unobtainable and/or unable to make site visits due to covid. Meanwhile our local garage, local tradespeople, shopkeepers etc, even our bin emptying manual council workers worked on throughout while coping with being short handed.
I think we are dealing with two related problems here. The first is that news is 24/7, and needs to be ever more dramatic in order to monopolise the attention of potential audiences. There's simply not enough news to fill the empty spaces, and we can't have incisive reporting all the time.
The second issue is that ironically, it would be possible to generate a lot more interesting news, but the agencies have fettered themselves. There could indeed be incisive reporting into lots of rackets and scams (global warming, wokery, the role of NGOs, the hypocrisy of politicians, pointless Higher Education, the erosion of British culture, etc.) but these are all taboo subjects for the MSM.
Talking of motor cars, this made me blink.
https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/bmw-charges-drivers-18-month-heated-seat-subscription
Our new tyres: I've just realised that we will probably be accused of stockpiling against inflation. Capitalist bastards!
Come to think of it, anyone with tyres near the end of their lives probably ought to push on and replace them pronto. We must check our spare.
A gardening tip: we find that old tyres work wonderfully well for containing compost used to mulch sensitive plants against winter frosts. A friend asked whether radials are best.
DJ - yes the news is mostly about personalities and how people feel about events. I recently read a piece about the Sri Lanka debacle which was almost all about the people who made such a mess of things rather than what they actually did.
dearieme - we have a local tyre and general servicing place which is very good although it doesn't open on Sunday. Part of a regional group with a simple online booking system. All very slick and it kept going through lockdown.
Woodsy - that's what impressed us so much, the contrast between public and private sectors. Supermarket staff never missed a beat.
Sam - maybe part of the reason why certain subjects are taboo for the MSM is that they are a constant source of copy and paste stories. They also have a delightful finger-pointing aspect which must add to the attraction. Climate change must have been worth a vast amount to the media.
dearieme - it made me blink too - lucky BMW drivers. They aren't even particularly good cars. We don't bother with sensitive plants, if they can't stand a bit of frost we replace them with something tougher.
Ah, AK, but we find globe artichokes an irresistible garden plant for both guzzling and looking at.
dearieme - this year we thought about growing globe artichokes because we'd grown them successfully years ago. But we have very little veg space where we are now so we didn't. Be fun to try them on the grandkids though.
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