22 September 2019

Prorogued Link Sausage Platter

These link sausages have been suspended from Question Time for five weeks because the sausage factory is not in session.

  • If the highway-robbery of textbook costs doesn't deter potential doctoral students, the (usually) unconscious institutional racism will probably do the trick. Is it any surprise that academics who overcome both tend — at least outside the business schools — toward the less-blindly-worshipful-of-the-status-quo predisposition?
  • Which, I suppose, is more intellectually honest than cable companies claiming that a la carte programming impairs their First Amendment rights. But what about mine, as a viewer? There are other parts of the First Amendment; isn't a government-approved channel selection including a wide variety of xtian-focused channels (but no Muslim or Jewish or Hindu or gawd-forbid atheist channels) also a First Amendment problem? Then, too, there's the Madigan problem: There is no First Amendment barrier against generally applicable rules that restrict commercial and quasicommercial deception. I can name just a few home-shopping channels and real-estate-flipping shows that fail there… without thinking very hard.

    In short, any claim that a la carte channel availability infringes on channel providers' rights is ludicrously far outside of intellectual honesty. But then, we are talking about the cable TV industry, so I suppose that "honesty" doesn't belong in the discussion in the first place.

  • Which still beats race-to-the-bottom selective corporate subsidies. The fundamental problem is simple: Why are only certain loudmouth arrogant self-interested bastards worthy of that kind of government subsidy? It doesn't have anything to do with electoral contributions and/or class solidarity to encourage abuse of power, does it? Or is Sunday afternoon a bad time for obvious rhetorical questions on the link sausage platter?
  • More fundamentally, does any of this matter any more?