The joy of Due South
It's a programme that can't see a fine line without walking towards it and treading catlike along it until it vanishes over the horizon. It moves from light to dark between scenes and within scenes. Benton is a naïf, a compulsive truth-teller living within an absurdly strict moral code and pathologically polite and literal mindset without ever being idiotic or unconvincing. He has impossible skills (tracking people through the mean city streets as he used to track caribou through the northwest territories as a boy) in a determinedly realistic setting. Ray is a hardbitten, cynical motormouth with an idealistic soul struggling wearily to shine through.
This article goes a long way to capturing what I loved about that series.
Beware the elephant of intuition
Argument: Because the elephant of intuition is more powerful than the rider of deliberation, moral judgements are firstly and mostly intuitive and only subsequently and occasionally reasoned
Highlight: Experiments which test subjects’ reactions to stories involving abnormal but not strictly harmful behaviour find that, instead of reasoning leading to response, the subjects react first and then develop – often rather contrived – rationales for their reactions
via www.matthewtaylorsblog.com
This is why discussions about politics and religion so rarely go well on the internet.
When I'm stressed…
Whenever I get stressed about finding work, about the fact that I’m going to be a father soon, about the huge changes that are sweeping over my life, I remember that I live here, that I’ve been married to a woman that I love for 9 years and that I have some fantastic, helpful and talented friends.
And suddenly I can’t find much to be stressed about…
