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April 23, 2008
Media Glutton April 23, 2008 Plus Future Compliant
Well, here it is, another Media Glutton entry, this time mostly about Frontline's great piece on universal health care systems around the globe:
I really do like PBS. It makes up a surprising amount of my TV watching each week, pretty much entirely for their non-fiction and commentary shows like Charlie Rose, Nova, Bill Moyers, and Frontline. Those are all great, interesting, high quality programs. Nova in particular is the gold standard of science television, and puts most of what you see on other science channels to shame. And let's not eve talk about the alien-loving, ghost-mongering, sensationalist claptrap that is The History Channel (the gold standard for low standards). But Frontline is probably my favorite. Even-handed, well researched, compellingly produced, it makes even subjects I'm not interested in fascinating. When they cover something I really care about, I'm beyond sucked in - I'm enthralled. And here's the other great thing about Frontline - they put their whole shows up online, plus lots of bonus material, making the information available all the time to anyone.
Last week's great episode was about a topic that I care a great deal about, a topic that is a national embarrassment here in the United States - health care. Many Americans who really should know better have some sort of visceral objection to nationalized or single payer health care systems. They cling to the delusion that the US system is the best in the world and that universal health care means endless waiting lists, low standards of care, and lack of choice. They cherry-pick the worst anecdotes they can remember and extrapolate the rest, forgetting that the plural of anecdote is anecdotes, not data. Thankfully Frontline, along with many actual researchers over the years, has gone out and collected the data and hopefully dispelled many of the myths about universal health care programs around the world....
Also I've got a new Future Compliant rant against Ben Stein up here which I couldn't post a link to last week because I was having site issues.
Future Compliant April 19, 2008
Yesterday marked the official release of a movie that is the antithesis of future compliance an anti-science, ignorant, biased piece of propaganda called Expelled. The film claims to be about academic freedom and open discussion of scientific controversies, but that's all just a smoke screen that thinly veils its real purpose: to promote the religion based, utterly unscientific proposition known as Intelligent Design. Intelligent Design is merely warmed over, watered down creationism and i not a scientific theory, much less a hypothesis. It's the latest gambit from religious radicals trying to sneak their god into classrooms, a desperate, hopefully futile attempt to block true science (and real facts) from impinging on their superstitions and un-founded beliefs. It's been debunked and destroyed time and again, but it keeps rearing its ugly head, and this time that head is Ben Stein.
Ben Stein has never held much of my esteem, although I did used to watch his game show and enjoyed it. But here he's either shown he's an idiot or a total sell out. I don't think he's an idiot, although he might well be, so I'm inclined to believe he's just a sell out, willing to hitch his wagon to the creationist gravy train for a while. Either way, he should be ashamed of himself for his role in this film. The fact that the film explicitly states that there would not have been a holocaust if not for Nazi's getting inspiration from Charles Darwin is not only stupid, wrong, and ignorant, but also hateful, arrogant, and dismissive of the real causes of one of history's worst tragedies. Plus here's the worst part - even if it were true (and it isn't) the idea that Hitler might have been wrongly inspired by Darwin DOES NOT MEAN DARWIN WAS WRONG. This is a pure propaganda move on the film makers' part, a huge logical fallacy that's utterly embarrassing, or would be if the film's creators were capable of embarrassment....
Posted by rdakan at April 23, 2008 09:41 AM