Guilty Pleasures

[lurid_archive]

Something I like doing, that MC barely lets me get away with, is listening to The Moral Maze.

Comments

[blahflowers]

I had to stop listening to it years ago, because of the Phillips and her vile ideas expressed really stupidly. They were doing the legalising drugs debate several years ago and her level of debate was so poor I remember the other anti-legalising peeps were disputing her because, as they said, she wasn't doing them any favours at all.

Sadly 'Hecklers' is much the same idea, just thankfully without the Phillips.

[gane5h]

But occasionally with the Bindel.

It's odd. I like to think I'm similar to Lurid in terms of being a perverse mix of compromiser and contrarian, but I find the Moral Maze difficult to listen. Xoc(taw Ridge) is more into it than I am.

[lurid_archive]

But its great performance art, from the artist known as "Melanie Philips".

[lurid_archive]

I'm surprised you find it that difficult. In some ways, I prefer to hear arguments and points that I think are stupid and misguided, since it makes me reflect on what I think much more. As I think you said, it is something lacking from Barbelith at the moment.

[gane5h]

Wellllll... hearing arguments and points that I think are stupid and misguided isn't something that I see as lacking in Barbelith at the moment (if you're addressing me there). If anything, that's increased of late and the common factor is that I can't readily intervene. Which is no doubt great from the point of view of me pruning my snarktree but quite irritating in a more general sense.

[as_alas_i_was]

I am with Lurid, strangely--have a kind of sick fascination with the show, but also the distance of being an American so I can distance myself in a way that I can't with Rush Limbaugh or somesuch...

[fridgemagnet]

I find it difficult to bear as well. If it was just MP saying her piece then having done with it, that would be one thing, but she then keeps repeating the stupidest, most irritating bits throughout the questions, often shouting over the guests. Her horrible hectoring voice coming from my radio, right there on my desk, is hard to ignore.

The rest of them are pretty bad as well. At least Phillips doesn't make any pretence of being open-minded and liberal, but the others frequently do, yet are tooth-achingly conservative Observer types. And they're all so incredibly superior.

Moral Maze is one of the few programmes that makes me think "perhaps it's not such a good idea to leave Radio 4 on all the time". There's plenty of middle-class-wittering and offensive dimwits at other times, but none so concentrated. It's like one of those "balanced" US discussion programmes where the range opinions is spread between wet neo-liberal and fascist.

[lurid_archive]

But thats what I find so compelling about it. The fact that the show seems to be proud both of the quality of argument offered *and* the diversity of the panel and guests, while actually maintaining an embarrasingly low standard of debate from identi-panellists.

Also, I like it to irritate me. I don't get irritated enough, I reckon.

[fridgemagnet]

I shall make no comments along the lines of "read the Switchboard more often then". (Apart from that one.)