Tag: reviews

Doctor Who Ratings Disaster

On By southwerkIn business ethics

The last three Doctor Who episodes are some of the lowest rated shows in the entire history of the franchise. That is in all of the sixty years of this formerly successful show. This horrible performance is not surprising considering we went from science fiction to a promotional vehicle for alternate life styles. That’s not Doctor Who.

How about Rotten Tomatoes? A 95% score for the critics and 28% from the audience. When transgender themes are significant in a program, the critics find this novel and worthy of their approval. It’s not novel anymore and dramatic lecturing about how wonderful these lifestyles are does not make for good story telling. The intellectual bankruptcy of modern criticism is everywhere evident and any intelligent human being will rely on the audience reaction.

What should be done? The British should fire everyone and I mean everyone. Fire the showrunner, the actors, the producers, everybody, find the guy the that sweeps up at night, fire him too.

And then wait for the memory of this “entertainment” to diminish in the public mind. At least five or six years until some innocent can say “Whatever happened to Doctor Who?” And then let’s find a new actor to play the doctor, an experienced actor with gravitas and a good track record in dealing with the public (someone who doesn’t tell the audience to “touch grass”). Maybe even someone who performed Shakespeare?

Then above all we have to find good writers who know and love science fiction — and who intend to write science fiction stories that motivate good acting and entertainment. It could celebrate heroism, good deeds and honor. It could tell coherent stories that are each uniquely interesting while being related to the development of the whole. Quality writing for a change.

And if you want a quality show, no one and I mean, no one gets hired because they’re female, lesbian, bisexual or just plain nuts. Hiring is based solely on merit and if the person with merit is a white male, well, we’ll manage to deal with it.

Let’s have a Doctor Who that celebrates its tradition of the human race confronted with the vastness and complexity of space. Let’s see adventure without an unhealthy fascination and advocacy of alternate lifestyles.

James Pilant

Jesse Watters Can’t Count or Can He?

On By southwerkIn business ethics

https://www.yahoo.com/news/nearly-choked-coffee-fox-news-201830195.html

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/jesse-watters-math-backfires_n_661ced3ce4b0f709554b39b4

Actually it may just be that he doesn’t want to. In his job as a “Newsman,” he wanted to overstate the effect of the $20 an hour California has mandated for fast food workers in some sectors. So, he implied that a single worker would make a 100,000 dollars a year on that salary. Surprisingly there was someone there who correctly stated the actual income.

So, he than claimed that a couple working fast food would earn a 100,000 dollars a year, only to once again be corrected.. Watters found the real figure of 40,000 dollars to be horribly unfair. I’m less sure about this. Let me quote a paragraph from the article:

Someone making $40,000 a year in California brings home about $32,000 after taxes, or about $2,666 a month. Meanwhile, according to Zillow, the state’s median rent sits at $2,790 a month. 

While he may believe that these workers are living lives of unearned luxury, the dollars amounts seem much less impressive against the cost of living and taxes.

Middle and lower class wages have been stagnant for about thirty-five years and the current minimum wage is pitiful. Yet, Watters and Fox News wants to portray these workers as the undeserving while portraying the owners of these huge chains as poor victims of state overreach. But the industry has been recording record profits over the last several years.

I think what the financial press is troubled most by is the empowerment and electoral clout of these workers being effective. In the past wage increases, like those in Washington State have not proven to be the disastert predicted.

And the simple fact is – paying working American a decent salary is a key element of economic growth and simple fairness.

James Alan Pilant

The Myth of Morality (via Patrick Nathan)

On By southwerkIn business ethics3 Comments

I found this an interesting review with many references to morality. Take this quote below –

Everyone agrees that The Pale King enshrines boredom. What has been glossed over, however, is how fiercely and unrepentantly American these pages are. Yes, the book expounds upon the marvels of boredom and the “heroic” nature of doing a quiet but necessary task without audience or recognition, but juxtaposed are endless descriptions of bureaucracies, American culture at its most dysfunctional, and even extended Platonian dialogues about the decline of American society, complete with terms that never fail to surface in today’s news: “liberal individualism,” “corporations,” “conservatives,” “founding fathers,” “consumer capitalism,” etc. “Americans are crazy,” one character remarks to another: “We infantilize ourselves. We don’t think of ourselves as citizens—parts of something larger to which we have profound responsibilities. We think of ourselves as citizens when it comes to our rights but not our responsibilities.” The selfishness described here again harkens back to Wallace’s speech, in which he revealed that our “natural, hardwired default setting” is to be “deeply and literally self-centered.”

If the reference is to our ethical and moral responsibility, I quite agree. However, the “hard wired” setting to be deeply and literally self centered, is ridiculous, we are just as hard wired to be cooperative and self sacrificing. That being deeply and literally self centered is an American doctrine used to justify cruel and immoral policies and actions. If humans are self centered monsters salivating after every last moment of pleasure and every conceivable possession, than we can justify every kind of lie and cruelty in the name of social control.

Nevertheless, I very much enjoyed the review and I would like you to read it.

James Pilant

My thanks to Patrick Nathan

The Myth of Morality In 2005, novelist David Foster Wallace was invited to give a commencement speech to the graduates of Kenyon College. Captivating, inquisitive, and in no way didactic, Wallace unveiled to them the oncoming drudgery of adult life and all its routines—certainly nothing an ambitious twenty-two year old wants to hear. But Wallace offered an alternative to mental and emotional atrophy. The liberal arts degree, he said, not only teaches us how to think … Read More

via Patrick Nathan