November 8, 2020

by 3 comments on "Andrew Neil should be broken up by the competition commission"

Another drive-by media studies thing. Efforts to regulate the media tend to focus on ownership (telco regulation people would say structural remedies) – should you be allowed to own a newspaper and a TV station? What about two TV stations? Can you vertically-integrate content production and distribution? Alternatively, they sometimes try functional things, like requiring…

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by 4 comments on "Cataloguing spin"

Around the end of August I was despairing of political accountability on the grounds that the effectiveness of what is generally called spin, the practice of tactical political publicity, seemed to have improved significantly since about 2005. What really worried me about it is that if it’s a technology, it can be improved, and as…

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by 2 comments on "Acracy followup"

So it looks like I’m not the only one thinking about Johnson and acracy: Johnson’s explanation for all these things is that he suffers from the classical vice of akrasia. He knows what the right thing to do is but acts against his better judgement through lack of self-control. He is, in Aristotle’s words, like…

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